Nested Covenant in Genesis 2-3
The second account of creation, and the account popularly known as the human fall, describe less the beginning of humanity and more the humanity of our beginning. God makes the earth and the heavens and humanity, but makes ‘the man’ from the earth, establishing the very fact of his making as separate from the rest of heaven and earth as a whole. No other creation is from creation; no other creation is given a specific task. These details are neither coincidental nor unrelated.
Human is created by the creator for created purpose; as purposed, human nature and human options nest uncomfortably between broad permissions and specific prohibition. The difficulty for the humans and the tension of the narrative consist in the inherent dilemmas of choice: freedom is at once broad, giving permission to sample the trees in the garden, and narrow, denying one specific tree as a good-faith option for those living in the garden. Negotiating this tension results in human vocation, at first harmoniously, and then, through breach of relationship, in hardship and contention.
The creation of the garden comes after the creation of the human primarily as a gift but also, perhaps, so that God can present the world’s oldest profession, gardening. God plants the trees in Eden and then causes them to grow and then waters them; one can almost imagine God demonstrating the object lesson, albeit on a grand scale. The four rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Pishon and the Gihon, are interesting not because of their mysterious locations but because they are not the first streams mentioned; the one in 2:6 springs from the earth to cover the whole face of the ground, while it still doesn’t rain. In the four rivers then, which presumably come from that stream and go specific places and lay bare certain lands, we witness God’s own act of irrigation.
The garden is set; the man is now set in it to till and keep it, likely in something of the manner God has done. But the man must also eat; “You may freely eat of any tree of the garden,” says God the gracious gardener. Before there is prohibition, there is gift. With vocation, there is gracious permission. All of this, the entirety of the work, has been done simply for the human. That the man is purposed, then, does not mean here that the man fills a niche in the garden, which God could certainly do without the man’s help, but perhaps does imply that the garden fills a niche in the man, or begins to. The fruit of the trees of the garden are in synecdoche the graciousness of the creating and gardening God – they are for him.
But that permissive generosity, while cosmic, is not without limit; in fact, the mere delineation of the garden placed for the man sets bounds on the realm of human activity, just as it establishes the possibility – eat of any tree of the garden does not mention anything outside the garden. But even in the garden is a poisonous plant; “on the day that you eat of it you shall die,” says God, suggesting a reality recognizable to ancient peoples. Eating can kill. From the many plants humans find good and necessary to eat a few will in fact end your life; while eating, the act itself, is good, not all food is good in its results. All of this comes matter-of-factly, perhaps because the nature of the poison does not matter overmuch to the dying person.
Not all food is good for the man; neither is all good within the man. “It is not good for the man to be alone,” says God. The bestiary God presents to the man does not suffice. In naming the animals the man sorts and identifies them and names none of them a helper and a partner. From a broad array of possibilities, none are suitable; the text leaves us with a surfeit of choices that are not good – at least not yet. But if the man is created from creation as purposed, both like the rest of creation and set aside from it, then the woman created from the man is doubly so; bone of his bones, she is like and unlike him, woman from his man. Here, from many false starts, is the one good choice in the garden, and to her he presumably clings.
The serpent at this point should not be surprising; we have already seen the limits of goodness in a poisonous tree and in the isolation of the man. This promising garden threatens to become something more like a jungle, and the serpent’s words do seem tangled as any skein of vine. The serpent begins by asking if God denies the humans to eat of all trees in the garden, making God’s prohibition as broad as God’s permission. No, says the woman, “but God said ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden…or you shall die.’” And one would wonder here, perhaps, if the humans could eat of any tree instead of none of the trees, why they would not be permitted to eat of one of them.
The thinking is serpentine, though both God’s command and human vocation were manifestly simple. But it is through confounding the fields of prohibition and permission that the serpent leads the woman astray, confusing her and perhaps her image of God – is he gracious in possibility or pernicious in complication? – up to the point where she sees that the fruit is good to eat, the one thing it is manifestly not. And while the serpent is right that she will not die, no one dies in this text, the poison of this fruit is not of the stomach but of the heart and mind and mouth.
Tilling and keeping by this point have long been forgotten for an intellectual dissection of God’s given gifts. God’s prohibition, by psychological conflation, has been made to seem larger than God’s permission, which has somehow vanished from the text. Everything established has been undone. The cleaving and helping and partnering is no more. While the woman offers the man her fruit, she does not offer him her opinion or ask for his advice in her discussion with the serpent; he of course does no better, and they both resort to divisive accusations when both of them stand before God. Consequently, the man once placed in the garden is sent out of it, and the woman with him. The vocation the man was once given to do now plagues rather then pleasures him, and the ground from which he was created will reclaim him, and he and she will indeed die.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
on the Council of Nicea: Consider Islam
Consider Islam. Though believed by many Muslims to be the incarnation of God’s attributes of holiness, justice and righteousness, Mohammed, the first Disciple and Prophet of Islam, is not and was not God. Mohammed is and was human. As human, Mohammed was and in some ways still is the head of a nation of people, the leader of a holy, political nation, the nation of Islam. All of this is not to say or intend any disrespect or disregard for Islam but is instead to posit the possibility that, barring the events culminating in the council of Nicea in 325 idea, things might not have turned out so differently for another Abrahamic faith, the faith of the disciples of the Way of Jesus Christ.
As the Jewish revolt and destruction of the Temple in 70 AD eliminated several possibilities for the future of Judaism, so the Council of Nicea commissioned by Constantine eliminated several possibilities for the future of Christianity. The very fact of its commissioning eliminated, of course, a version of Christianity wiped out by Roman imperialism and Christian impertinence – a fate not eliminated, let us note, for their Jewish counterparts several centuries before and which lingered through the persecutions as a distinct possibility for the early Christians, especially as the Empire grew more uncertain about its security.
But the council of Nicea itself concluded a fair number of sectarian struggles within the Christian ranks themselves. It decided with fair finality that Jesus Christ was both fully God and distinct from God the Father, against the monarchist theology of Arius – which would have allowed a monotheism much more like Islam’s, having the self-same God acting throughout all of history despite various manifestations of the same divine substance.
At the same time, the argument by which the Council refuted Arius and came to a consensus through Athanasius – that this Jesus-God was in no way subordinate to the Father-God in divinity – would come to mean that the Roman Church was in no way subordinate to the Empire when it came to its own affairs. This was in no way a given, considering who commissioned the Council and for what reason he had done so – namely, to produce a religious tool capable of reuniting the Empire as a whole, doubtless much as the Roman gods had helped to do in times past. “Let whatsoever I will, be that esteemed a canon,” spake Constantius.
Such a view would have been doctrinally consonant with the subordination of the Son to the Father in the theology of Arius. But it was not consonant with the Trinitarian equality of Father and Son in the mind of bishop Ambrose of Milan, who said to Theodosius, “The emperor is in the church, not above it,” when the unrepentant emperor came to take communion. This idea of imminent domain – that the respective kingdoms of Imperial Christendom and the Christian Church each had dominion over themselves when addressing their own affairs – may indeed have meant that the Christian West was about to begin a long and bloody relationship of church and state.
But it also made the distinction forever possible in the minds of Roman Christians and their descendants, a distinction not seen in the history of Islam, where a more rigid monotheism and a much less divine prophet would imply that the spheres of nation and faith need never be separate at all.
As the Jewish revolt and destruction of the Temple in 70 AD eliminated several possibilities for the future of Judaism, so the Council of Nicea commissioned by Constantine eliminated several possibilities for the future of Christianity. The very fact of its commissioning eliminated, of course, a version of Christianity wiped out by Roman imperialism and Christian impertinence – a fate not eliminated, let us note, for their Jewish counterparts several centuries before and which lingered through the persecutions as a distinct possibility for the early Christians, especially as the Empire grew more uncertain about its security.
But the council of Nicea itself concluded a fair number of sectarian struggles within the Christian ranks themselves. It decided with fair finality that Jesus Christ was both fully God and distinct from God the Father, against the monarchist theology of Arius – which would have allowed a monotheism much more like Islam’s, having the self-same God acting throughout all of history despite various manifestations of the same divine substance.
At the same time, the argument by which the Council refuted Arius and came to a consensus through Athanasius – that this Jesus-God was in no way subordinate to the Father-God in divinity – would come to mean that the Roman Church was in no way subordinate to the Empire when it came to its own affairs. This was in no way a given, considering who commissioned the Council and for what reason he had done so – namely, to produce a religious tool capable of reuniting the Empire as a whole, doubtless much as the Roman gods had helped to do in times past. “Let whatsoever I will, be that esteemed a canon,” spake Constantius.
Such a view would have been doctrinally consonant with the subordination of the Son to the Father in the theology of Arius. But it was not consonant with the Trinitarian equality of Father and Son in the mind of bishop Ambrose of Milan, who said to Theodosius, “The emperor is in the church, not above it,” when the unrepentant emperor came to take communion. This idea of imminent domain – that the respective kingdoms of Imperial Christendom and the Christian Church each had dominion over themselves when addressing their own affairs – may indeed have meant that the Christian West was about to begin a long and bloody relationship of church and state.
But it also made the distinction forever possible in the minds of Roman Christians and their descendants, a distinction not seen in the history of Islam, where a more rigid monotheism and a much less divine prophet would imply that the spheres of nation and faith need never be separate at all.
on John 18:1-13: Let My People Go
Let My People Go
Jesus needs his men alive. When the betrayer Judas comes to the garden with a detachment of soldiers and the temple guards, he imperils not Christ, whose doom is already certain, but the eleven disciples whose faith has yet to be tested. Jesus the Light of men has just finished imploring the Father to protect the ones who are with him so that others may believe through their witness. Their time has clearly not yet come, and Jesus at least thought their fate worthy of specific prayer.
And Jesus is about to be arrested at night, the time immemorial of political disappearances. If the Roman Empire will not hesitate to execute Christ, the leader of a suspicious movement in the high Jewish city by the full light of day during the most sacred national week in all Israel, then his lieutenants must be in far greater peril in the darkness, very much imagined in John as the province of men. Otherwise, why not just arrest him openly by day? Who did they come for, really? Just Jesus? How about his number two?
True, the Jews have been advised by Caiphas that it would be better that one man die for Israel, presumably thus sacrificing an anyways troublesome leader to appease the Roman order’s demand for civic stability. But Peter’s striking the ear from that very priest’s servant would imperil the group still further; one wanders how long Caiphas’s advice would hold by night with violence in the air and soldiers and guards gathered to suppress a group of dissidents and arrest their leader.
Gathered here is everyone who does not understand the light, though their actions will very much bring about the elevation of Christ he has just foretold; the men of darkness carry light to Christ’s arrest just as they will later, unawares, raise up Christ for all to see and believe. Like the Pharisees in John 9, they believe they see, but do not see – and so they are condemned.
But are the disciples in danger? Surely threats loom on all sides from guards and soldiers alike, but most readings of this passage present Christ as in serene command of the situation. This is consonant with the magisterial Johanine gospel as a whole. And in this very scene, his words seem to unman the entire soldierly contingent, which falls to the ground.
As Romans fought in formation, this would have been a troublesome beginning for them were any kind of violence going to occur. The arrest of Jesus in John can indeed seem to play out as a drama where the lines of all the players have already been written.
Yet passion need not play so small a part in John’s account of Christ’s arrest, trial, and execution. Jesus’s reassurances mostly concern himself, his relation to the Father, and the triumph of his gospel. About the fate of his disciples Jesus seems both less certain and less triumphant. His most recent words concerning Peter, after all, are that Peter will deny him three times before the ordeal is over.
The reversal does not come until after the resurrection when, along with all the other disciples, Peter is ready to join the general witness, to testify to what they have all seen, and specifically to lead and feed Jesus’s sheep. Why the concern for Peter’s actions in this scene if his eventual (narrative) redemption was already determined?
But if John has Jesus working out the distinction between himself and his followers in narrative time – “if you have come for me, let these men go” (emphasis mine) – because their trial has not yet come, then it really, really matters that they leave the garden alive.
And it really, really matters that Peter puts away his sword, not simply because “the time” isn’t right yet, but because Jesus has just finished asking Peter if Peter will lay down his life for him, and answered his own question as “not yet.” The time of Peter’s trial has not yet come; Jesus is still the shepherd here. Peter will be one only after the first has laid down his life, which I contend begins here and now in John 18.
“Let these men go,” says Jesus the shepherd after Moses’s own heart – Moses the shepherd of Midian who God told to tell Pharaoh “Let my people go,” Moses who volunteered to be stricken down rather than the whole people of the Hebrews be condemned. That Jesus says much the same cannot have escaped the mind of Jesus, the minds of the Johanine author(s), or the mind of the text itself.
That Jesus actually surpasses Moses by being executed in spite of his innocence only means he becomes the shepherd that scripture promised, the one who lays down his life for his sheep. He offers himself repeatedly, “I am he, I am he,” not only to proclaim his identity as the promised one, but also to convince the guards and soldiers to focus their evil intent and attention on him rather than those around him, the sheep that have not yet reached their promised land.
Jesus needs his men alive. When the betrayer Judas comes to the garden with a detachment of soldiers and the temple guards, he imperils not Christ, whose doom is already certain, but the eleven disciples whose faith has yet to be tested. Jesus the Light of men has just finished imploring the Father to protect the ones who are with him so that others may believe through their witness. Their time has clearly not yet come, and Jesus at least thought their fate worthy of specific prayer.
And Jesus is about to be arrested at night, the time immemorial of political disappearances. If the Roman Empire will not hesitate to execute Christ, the leader of a suspicious movement in the high Jewish city by the full light of day during the most sacred national week in all Israel, then his lieutenants must be in far greater peril in the darkness, very much imagined in John as the province of men. Otherwise, why not just arrest him openly by day? Who did they come for, really? Just Jesus? How about his number two?
True, the Jews have been advised by Caiphas that it would be better that one man die for Israel, presumably thus sacrificing an anyways troublesome leader to appease the Roman order’s demand for civic stability. But Peter’s striking the ear from that very priest’s servant would imperil the group still further; one wanders how long Caiphas’s advice would hold by night with violence in the air and soldiers and guards gathered to suppress a group of dissidents and arrest their leader.
Gathered here is everyone who does not understand the light, though their actions will very much bring about the elevation of Christ he has just foretold; the men of darkness carry light to Christ’s arrest just as they will later, unawares, raise up Christ for all to see and believe. Like the Pharisees in John 9, they believe they see, but do not see – and so they are condemned.
But are the disciples in danger? Surely threats loom on all sides from guards and soldiers alike, but most readings of this passage present Christ as in serene command of the situation. This is consonant with the magisterial Johanine gospel as a whole. And in this very scene, his words seem to unman the entire soldierly contingent, which falls to the ground.
As Romans fought in formation, this would have been a troublesome beginning for them were any kind of violence going to occur. The arrest of Jesus in John can indeed seem to play out as a drama where the lines of all the players have already been written.
Yet passion need not play so small a part in John’s account of Christ’s arrest, trial, and execution. Jesus’s reassurances mostly concern himself, his relation to the Father, and the triumph of his gospel. About the fate of his disciples Jesus seems both less certain and less triumphant. His most recent words concerning Peter, after all, are that Peter will deny him three times before the ordeal is over.
The reversal does not come until after the resurrection when, along with all the other disciples, Peter is ready to join the general witness, to testify to what they have all seen, and specifically to lead and feed Jesus’s sheep. Why the concern for Peter’s actions in this scene if his eventual (narrative) redemption was already determined?
But if John has Jesus working out the distinction between himself and his followers in narrative time – “if you have come for me, let these men go” (emphasis mine) – because their trial has not yet come, then it really, really matters that they leave the garden alive.
And it really, really matters that Peter puts away his sword, not simply because “the time” isn’t right yet, but because Jesus has just finished asking Peter if Peter will lay down his life for him, and answered his own question as “not yet.” The time of Peter’s trial has not yet come; Jesus is still the shepherd here. Peter will be one only after the first has laid down his life, which I contend begins here and now in John 18.
“Let these men go,” says Jesus the shepherd after Moses’s own heart – Moses the shepherd of Midian who God told to tell Pharaoh “Let my people go,” Moses who volunteered to be stricken down rather than the whole people of the Hebrews be condemned. That Jesus says much the same cannot have escaped the mind of Jesus, the minds of the Johanine author(s), or the mind of the text itself.
That Jesus actually surpasses Moses by being executed in spite of his innocence only means he becomes the shepherd that scripture promised, the one who lays down his life for his sheep. He offers himself repeatedly, “I am he, I am he,” not only to proclaim his identity as the promised one, but also to convince the guards and soldiers to focus their evil intent and attention on him rather than those around him, the sheep that have not yet reached their promised land.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
on God, the World's Future: Dissonance
Dissonance
"The term method refers to a way or means of disclosing truth…it follows a three-step movement from the compactness of primary understanding through analytical exposition toward theological construction… we begin at the level of symbolic understanding…we engage in exposition or analysis…this leads to constructive theology” (35).
How does the theologian know? Peters would have us begin the task of knowing with biblical symbols, which one might define as gospel interpreted through scripture, reason, tradition, and experience – though for Peters the gospel itself interprets scripture, suggesting a certain essential back-and-forth that Peters does not always seem to recognize.
Yet to begin the process of theology with the symbols that are to be explicated puts something of the methodological cart before the motivational horse; in clearly elucidating how we might (or must, if we take Peters at his word) go about systematic theology, Peters here proposes a model for thinking about God which contains no awareness of why we might do such theology in the first place.
I propose that a model of systematic theology which begins with its own origins would be more powerfully explicatory and no less systematic than the project which Peters proposes, as both trees of knowledge would yield the same theological fruit.
So that where Peters says that symbols are reality detectors (36), I say that reality is a symbol detector. In other words, theology is less the church thinking about its belief and more belief thinking about why it might go to church. Theology is the body of Christ pondering the inclinations of its heart, answering Augustine’s question of ‘what do I love, when I love my God?’ I would hope that this would be the origin of any theology, however systematic.
I would hope that explaining the significance of the gospel (82) would in fact begin with some sort of relation to, some sort of experience of, the relational God the gospel is about. By omitting persons from either end of the theological process, Peters has created for the church a method of theology which most any atheist might engage in.
Which is not to say that the method is wrong, but is to say that it strikes one as incomplete. If we begin our theological system not with the originary symbols of Christianity but with the experiences that make us Christian (including symbols). We can indeed have no experience apart from symbols, and one might well interpret the same religious experience differently depending one one’s available symbolic system, but Peters would seem to locate the meaning of that event in relation to its symbols.
Most would not do this; the true test of a hypothetical is not whether or not it corresponds to any particular symbol, be it Christian or no, but in whether or not it describes the reality of a particular experience. Symbols, even the gospel, are only meaningful insofar as they illumine the spectrum of reality evidenced by Peters’ prism.
To elucidate a broader method for systematic theology would escape the bounds of this paper, but were one to say “The term method refers to a way or means of explicating truth. It follows a four-step movement from existential intuition through symbolic illumination and analytical exposition toward theological re-construction. We begin with experiential incomprehension,” then one would at least be beginning the method with the reason for the method.
While Peters does incorporate experience in his model, he offers it little value; by restoring its more obvious pride of place, the God our theological system addresses becomes not only the historic Christ alluded to by symbols, but the lived reality of God still present and active in the world.
"The term method refers to a way or means of disclosing truth…it follows a three-step movement from the compactness of primary understanding through analytical exposition toward theological construction… we begin at the level of symbolic understanding…we engage in exposition or analysis…this leads to constructive theology” (35).
How does the theologian know? Peters would have us begin the task of knowing with biblical symbols, which one might define as gospel interpreted through scripture, reason, tradition, and experience – though for Peters the gospel itself interprets scripture, suggesting a certain essential back-and-forth that Peters does not always seem to recognize.
Yet to begin the process of theology with the symbols that are to be explicated puts something of the methodological cart before the motivational horse; in clearly elucidating how we might (or must, if we take Peters at his word) go about systematic theology, Peters here proposes a model for thinking about God which contains no awareness of why we might do such theology in the first place.
I propose that a model of systematic theology which begins with its own origins would be more powerfully explicatory and no less systematic than the project which Peters proposes, as both trees of knowledge would yield the same theological fruit.
So that where Peters says that symbols are reality detectors (36), I say that reality is a symbol detector. In other words, theology is less the church thinking about its belief and more belief thinking about why it might go to church. Theology is the body of Christ pondering the inclinations of its heart, answering Augustine’s question of ‘what do I love, when I love my God?’ I would hope that this would be the origin of any theology, however systematic.
I would hope that explaining the significance of the gospel (82) would in fact begin with some sort of relation to, some sort of experience of, the relational God the gospel is about. By omitting persons from either end of the theological process, Peters has created for the church a method of theology which most any atheist might engage in.
Which is not to say that the method is wrong, but is to say that it strikes one as incomplete. If we begin our theological system not with the originary symbols of Christianity but with the experiences that make us Christian (including symbols). We can indeed have no experience apart from symbols, and one might well interpret the same religious experience differently depending one one’s available symbolic system, but Peters would seem to locate the meaning of that event in relation to its symbols.
Most would not do this; the true test of a hypothetical is not whether or not it corresponds to any particular symbol, be it Christian or no, but in whether or not it describes the reality of a particular experience. Symbols, even the gospel, are only meaningful insofar as they illumine the spectrum of reality evidenced by Peters’ prism.
To elucidate a broader method for systematic theology would escape the bounds of this paper, but were one to say “The term method refers to a way or means of explicating truth. It follows a four-step movement from existential intuition through symbolic illumination and analytical exposition toward theological re-construction. We begin with experiential incomprehension,” then one would at least be beginning the method with the reason for the method.
While Peters does incorporate experience in his model, he offers it little value; by restoring its more obvious pride of place, the God our theological system addresses becomes not only the historic Christ alluded to by symbols, but the lived reality of God still present and active in the world.
on God, the World's Future: Consonance
Consonance
“The keys to a postmodern hermeneutic are suspicion and trust” (46).
At its base, at its best, postmodern thought might well be summarized as a profound realization of human limitation. The symbols that ought to lead us into the path of truth we take with us instead, using them to baptize our basest cruelties and most sinful and unwarranted desires. We trust that our traditional religious symbols will not betray us, but we betray the better angels of our traditions instead.
Too eagerly, we assume that, rather than being led to our eventual God by the metaphors of our theology, we are in fact already there and those symbols are clearly manifest in our persons and our practices, as opposed to anyone and everyone else’s.
But we cannot abandon religious symbols, for they are all in some sense that we have, we always already have them – if we allow that religious symbols can be manifested by those who are not manifestly religious, if even Neanderthals can care about how they bury the dead.
To escape religion then is not to escape the thinking that produces religious symbols, but simply to swap them out for some alternative. The problem is not the symbols, but our attitude. What the Greeks would call hubris is not confined to those who share the scandal of the Cross.
Everyone gets religious symbols; what we must consider is whether or not our own offer explicatory power, and what precisely our own best symbols are. To test these we assume that they are true, we take them on faith; symbols are in fact the currency of faith: “in God we trust.”
We take our symbols from our traditions and cast their net upon the world to see what they might catch, and we cannot fish alone; we actually belong to grand fishing traditions, fish are a prime denomination of our faith.
And all we know about money is that it cannot abide alone. To buy and sell is a relational transaction, to cast the net of our assumptions into the marketplace of all ideas. This does not work if I alone believe. We believe in one God, creator of heaven and earth. The economy of faith requires more than one person, just as it takes more than one person to haul a net, and a crisis of faith in money or in fish can bring the whole world down.
And already we see something of a yield, for we see in that other master an unholy trinity of seller, buyer, and sold, the content a serious challenge to faith in God but the dynamic a potential model of how the God of faith might function; no component of this transaction exists in and of itself economically, but each exists by and for each of the others, however much the seller might have originated the transaction, if not the want which resides in the spirit of all human buyers.
But still we must say that something fishy is going on, because ours is a family business, operated not on the principle of the wants of desire, not on the machinations of greed, but on the gifts and graces of the needful economy of love. Jesus sells himself, does more wonders than all the ads of the world could tell.
There is always plenty of fish for everyone – good enough news, we might say, to net just about anyone. So our net profit is not measured in goods or worldly gains but solely on the hiring of new hands, no matter what time they come. Many hands make light the yoke, and ease the burden to a fish breakfast by the sea. This is the ad par excellence, the copy by which read all our other copy.
And like all the best ads, Jesus is both expected and surprising, innocent and alluring, a provocateur with more lives than anyone might have guessed. But unlike all ads, better than any ad, there is no regret for what he’s selling. There is no buyer’s remorse for love, however costly it might be. Like fish themselves, love is both sold in fine restaurants and best cooked over a pit by the sea – its price is precisely what we decide it is.
The most fluid of consumables is that which we cannot possibly consume, a meal which, like fish again, offers almost infinite sustenance but rarely satiation. Is that worthless? Or is that worth everything we have?
The offering of Jesus is most suspicious indeed, too good, in fact, to correspond to any known reality. But the question of our trust is whether, in fact, this offering is too good to be anything but true, scandalous not because it fails to explain the world but because it cannot help but change it.
“The keys to a postmodern hermeneutic are suspicion and trust” (46).
At its base, at its best, postmodern thought might well be summarized as a profound realization of human limitation. The symbols that ought to lead us into the path of truth we take with us instead, using them to baptize our basest cruelties and most sinful and unwarranted desires. We trust that our traditional religious symbols will not betray us, but we betray the better angels of our traditions instead.
Too eagerly, we assume that, rather than being led to our eventual God by the metaphors of our theology, we are in fact already there and those symbols are clearly manifest in our persons and our practices, as opposed to anyone and everyone else’s.
But we cannot abandon religious symbols, for they are all in some sense that we have, we always already have them – if we allow that religious symbols can be manifested by those who are not manifestly religious, if even Neanderthals can care about how they bury the dead.
To escape religion then is not to escape the thinking that produces religious symbols, but simply to swap them out for some alternative. The problem is not the symbols, but our attitude. What the Greeks would call hubris is not confined to those who share the scandal of the Cross.
Everyone gets religious symbols; what we must consider is whether or not our own offer explicatory power, and what precisely our own best symbols are. To test these we assume that they are true, we take them on faith; symbols are in fact the currency of faith: “in God we trust.”
We take our symbols from our traditions and cast their net upon the world to see what they might catch, and we cannot fish alone; we actually belong to grand fishing traditions, fish are a prime denomination of our faith.
And all we know about money is that it cannot abide alone. To buy and sell is a relational transaction, to cast the net of our assumptions into the marketplace of all ideas. This does not work if I alone believe. We believe in one God, creator of heaven and earth. The economy of faith requires more than one person, just as it takes more than one person to haul a net, and a crisis of faith in money or in fish can bring the whole world down.
And already we see something of a yield, for we see in that other master an unholy trinity of seller, buyer, and sold, the content a serious challenge to faith in God but the dynamic a potential model of how the God of faith might function; no component of this transaction exists in and of itself economically, but each exists by and for each of the others, however much the seller might have originated the transaction, if not the want which resides in the spirit of all human buyers.
But still we must say that something fishy is going on, because ours is a family business, operated not on the principle of the wants of desire, not on the machinations of greed, but on the gifts and graces of the needful economy of love. Jesus sells himself, does more wonders than all the ads of the world could tell.
There is always plenty of fish for everyone – good enough news, we might say, to net just about anyone. So our net profit is not measured in goods or worldly gains but solely on the hiring of new hands, no matter what time they come. Many hands make light the yoke, and ease the burden to a fish breakfast by the sea. This is the ad par excellence, the copy by which read all our other copy.
And like all the best ads, Jesus is both expected and surprising, innocent and alluring, a provocateur with more lives than anyone might have guessed. But unlike all ads, better than any ad, there is no regret for what he’s selling. There is no buyer’s remorse for love, however costly it might be. Like fish themselves, love is both sold in fine restaurants and best cooked over a pit by the sea – its price is precisely what we decide it is.
The most fluid of consumables is that which we cannot possibly consume, a meal which, like fish again, offers almost infinite sustenance but rarely satiation. Is that worthless? Or is that worth everything we have?
The offering of Jesus is most suspicious indeed, too good, in fact, to correspond to any known reality. But the question of our trust is whether, in fact, this offering is too good to be anything but true, scandalous not because it fails to explain the world but because it cannot help but change it.
Editorial: What Kind of Day Has It Been
I wouldn't usually go down such a bloggish route, but so many people have asked me in so many contexts, and with such evident hope on their expectant faces and in their bright and earnest tones, I thought I might answer it definitively here.
Q: So, how do I like seminary?
A: Well, I don't guess I care for it all that much.
I do hate to disappoint good people. But there are reasons, and reasons I hope will not necessarily endure, and reasons to hope I might endure myself.
The largest problem is no doubt my massive tendencies toward lateral thinking, toward parallel thinking, in a pretty solidly linear world. Which is to say that I'm trying to see the forest while people keep throwing trees at me. It has ever been thus in my academic career. My grades each semester from high school onward betrayed a distinctively upward turn, and so did my comprehension.
The point is not my scores, which haven't happened yet, but that I'm absorbing enormous amounts of information without hardly any time to process any of it. For the eureeka moment to occur, you actually have to stop and take a bath. For any and every light to dawn, I have had to hold each time to patience, however hard and implausible such a course may seem anew at each beginning. I'm reminded, particularly, of my semester of study at the Oregon Extension, and that turned out well.
Which doesn't make me any less frustrated now, of course.
The second, and equally persistent problem, we might well call socialization. It is strange that I enter seminary with MORE of essentially the same attitude I started college with: that I'm here to take classes, and everyone else is pretty much incidental. At the same time, however, I now have an actual theological stance, an actual existential conviction, that everyone else is to some degree all that ultimately matters.
It puts one in quite the schizophrenic state of mind: when I seclude myself in my room to read, I wonder if I ought instead to be in the lounge making connections, and when I stop where someone has some kind of collectible card deck going, I feel all the hounds of academia on my heels, so that I haven't been comfortable, haven't been at rest, ever, in any context or in any situation, never mind that my self-consciousness means I feel that, not only should I NOT be doing whatever I'm doing right now, I should ALSO be doing it BETTER - I should open up more AND be more academically focused, all at the same time and in the first few weeks of term and in complete contradiction to whatever I happen to be doing at the time.
Yup, those are pretty much my expectations, and, much as I might to have an off-button for them somewhere, I haven't found that yet. Can't turn off the brain. A situation hindered only a little bit by my not taking the orientation week while I was moving in, and much more by my not taking introductory Greek along with every other warm living body this summer. It's not that I don't know anyone, that's to be expected. It's that I'm one of basically three people who don't know anyone, and the other two are pretty much never around.
Third, I am not a Lutheran, and am certainly not as much of a Christian's christian as most of the people here. A few years ago, I decided, definitively, that I no longer wanted to be a better person, ever, and now I go to class with people who want to be pastors. I said that I was getting out of Paul's race, not pressing onward to the goal, because it looked too much like a treadmill and I don't have that kind of energy, and now I go to class with many people whom, if my experience is any indication, actually want to be a little bit like Paul. Mission this, mission that, discipleship this, discipline that, and all I want to do, personally, is sit in my room and think.
And I mean, I think that's not so much not wanting to go out of my comfort zone as it is my not wanting to go outside of my interest-zone, because I realize more than I did when I was in college that life is short and I don't owe anything to anyone but myself and my God. But it makes me feel like less of a Christian, and makes me wonder why I'm in seminary at all if all I wanted was the credits necessary to land in a PhD program.
Which is not what you need to be doing to start off the first semester, because how serious are these concerns and how much of them is just anxiety in the face of newness, a perpetually human and personal problem?
Finally, and this is the most serious concern, the intellectual climate here is more conservative and modern to my more post-liberal postmodern ways. This isn't a deal-breaker so much as it is simply and certainly annoying. Everyone here sees the possibilities for Christianity in postmodern thought and then says, 'but there's danger there' and backs away and runs their little flag up some position taken fifty years ago. Which, I mean, I've lived in dissent for most of my life, but in the last few years I've met mostly only warm regard and have gone very much my own way, and I admit I've gotten more than a little used to it.
And I want to agree with everyone. If I can find a way to argue myself into agreement with you, I will in fact do it.
But now somewhere stands up there and says that 'theology is the church thinking about its belief,' and I think 'what a horrible, awful, stuffy and institutional thing to say.' Or someone says that symbols precede experience in the methods of theology, and I think, 'well, maybe, but why do it then?'.
And it's not that I overwhelmingly disagree with these things - I would swallow that theology is the body of Christ pondering the inclinations of its heart, or that symbol and experience and theology itself cycle through our relationship to God and self alike so that to put one in front of the other is a distinction without a difference. But it is to say that I'm annoyed and tired by the process of having to argue my way there, and trying to decide if such a jaunt is worthy of mentioning in class when the discussion never goes remotely in any such direction, and I suspect I might ultimately agree anyway.
This week, I looked up the Institute for Christian Studies, the source, via my favorite professor's own education, of most all of my own idiosyncratic leanings.
Well, it'll be interesting to see how all this turns out.
Q: So, how do I like seminary?
A: Well, I don't guess I care for it all that much.
I do hate to disappoint good people. But there are reasons, and reasons I hope will not necessarily endure, and reasons to hope I might endure myself.
The largest problem is no doubt my massive tendencies toward lateral thinking, toward parallel thinking, in a pretty solidly linear world. Which is to say that I'm trying to see the forest while people keep throwing trees at me. It has ever been thus in my academic career. My grades each semester from high school onward betrayed a distinctively upward turn, and so did my comprehension.
The point is not my scores, which haven't happened yet, but that I'm absorbing enormous amounts of information without hardly any time to process any of it. For the eureeka moment to occur, you actually have to stop and take a bath. For any and every light to dawn, I have had to hold each time to patience, however hard and implausible such a course may seem anew at each beginning. I'm reminded, particularly, of my semester of study at the Oregon Extension, and that turned out well.
Which doesn't make me any less frustrated now, of course.
The second, and equally persistent problem, we might well call socialization. It is strange that I enter seminary with MORE of essentially the same attitude I started college with: that I'm here to take classes, and everyone else is pretty much incidental. At the same time, however, I now have an actual theological stance, an actual existential conviction, that everyone else is to some degree all that ultimately matters.
It puts one in quite the schizophrenic state of mind: when I seclude myself in my room to read, I wonder if I ought instead to be in the lounge making connections, and when I stop where someone has some kind of collectible card deck going, I feel all the hounds of academia on my heels, so that I haven't been comfortable, haven't been at rest, ever, in any context or in any situation, never mind that my self-consciousness means I feel that, not only should I NOT be doing whatever I'm doing right now, I should ALSO be doing it BETTER - I should open up more AND be more academically focused, all at the same time and in the first few weeks of term and in complete contradiction to whatever I happen to be doing at the time.
Yup, those are pretty much my expectations, and, much as I might to have an off-button for them somewhere, I haven't found that yet. Can't turn off the brain. A situation hindered only a little bit by my not taking the orientation week while I was moving in, and much more by my not taking introductory Greek along with every other warm living body this summer. It's not that I don't know anyone, that's to be expected. It's that I'm one of basically three people who don't know anyone, and the other two are pretty much never around.
Third, I am not a Lutheran, and am certainly not as much of a Christian's christian as most of the people here. A few years ago, I decided, definitively, that I no longer wanted to be a better person, ever, and now I go to class with people who want to be pastors. I said that I was getting out of Paul's race, not pressing onward to the goal, because it looked too much like a treadmill and I don't have that kind of energy, and now I go to class with many people whom, if my experience is any indication, actually want to be a little bit like Paul. Mission this, mission that, discipleship this, discipline that, and all I want to do, personally, is sit in my room and think.
And I mean, I think that's not so much not wanting to go out of my comfort zone as it is my not wanting to go outside of my interest-zone, because I realize more than I did when I was in college that life is short and I don't owe anything to anyone but myself and my God. But it makes me feel like less of a Christian, and makes me wonder why I'm in seminary at all if all I wanted was the credits necessary to land in a PhD program.
Which is not what you need to be doing to start off the first semester, because how serious are these concerns and how much of them is just anxiety in the face of newness, a perpetually human and personal problem?
Finally, and this is the most serious concern, the intellectual climate here is more conservative and modern to my more post-liberal postmodern ways. This isn't a deal-breaker so much as it is simply and certainly annoying. Everyone here sees the possibilities for Christianity in postmodern thought and then says, 'but there's danger there' and backs away and runs their little flag up some position taken fifty years ago. Which, I mean, I've lived in dissent for most of my life, but in the last few years I've met mostly only warm regard and have gone very much my own way, and I admit I've gotten more than a little used to it.
And I want to agree with everyone. If I can find a way to argue myself into agreement with you, I will in fact do it.
But now somewhere stands up there and says that 'theology is the church thinking about its belief,' and I think 'what a horrible, awful, stuffy and institutional thing to say.' Or someone says that symbols precede experience in the methods of theology, and I think, 'well, maybe, but why do it then?'.
And it's not that I overwhelmingly disagree with these things - I would swallow that theology is the body of Christ pondering the inclinations of its heart, or that symbol and experience and theology itself cycle through our relationship to God and self alike so that to put one in front of the other is a distinction without a difference. But it is to say that I'm annoyed and tired by the process of having to argue my way there, and trying to decide if such a jaunt is worthy of mentioning in class when the discussion never goes remotely in any such direction, and I suspect I might ultimately agree anyway.
This week, I looked up the Institute for Christian Studies, the source, via my favorite professor's own education, of most all of my own idiosyncratic leanings.
Well, it'll be interesting to see how all this turns out.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Pressed: on the Fall of Jerusalem
One might well consider the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD to be a primarily Jewish event. But the circumstances of the time precluded it being solely a Jewish event, and its impact must resonate for Christians, at the very least, to the same degree to which the destruction of the Temple affected Jewish-Christian relations. One wonders how we might have regarded our mother faith if we had not been so externally separated from it. Titus might have failed, in destroying the Temple, to more completely abolish the Jewish and Christian religions, but one can say with little difficulty that he succeeded in further separating them.
That this occurred just as Christianity was trying to define itself and define its relations with Jews might indeed have set them on more swiftly diverging courses. Not only did this force Christians and Jews to physically relocate, it moved the center of the faith for both religions outward from Jerusalem – to the synagogues for Jews, to the Gentiles for the Christians. This meant Rabbis and Bishops as well as Mishna and written Gospels and Epistles placed in the hands of Jewish and Christian congregations alike.
Not that these developments were not parallel – one can readily see that they were – but that the similar developments in both faiths allowed them to become more different and distant over time. Jesus had once spent a lot of time critiquing the Temple system, one that was now forfeit. Even he didn’t argue with the synagogues, so one imagines the Christians finding new ways to occupy their time. Mishna might have continued commentary on the Torah, but Epistles favored commentary on the Gospels. Pauline proclamations of Christ’s sacrifice won out over Jesus’s own proclamations of the Kingdom of God prefigured in the Old Testament. Paul won out over Peter even as Christians claimed the Jewish God-fearers.
How does this affect us today? Well, we don’t circumcise, for starters; we don’t keep kosher, and we certainly don’t think that Leviticus is the center of the Pentateuch. Most of us wouldn’t recognize the Shema if we heard it, and we don’t list among our creeds anything about our ancestor being a nomad. The Kingdom of God is poorly understood, many believe that Grace replaces rather than fulfills the Law, and we are able to be more distantly sympathetic than intimately opposed to our Jewish associates.
Both Christians and Jews, for example, await the ingathering of the other at the end of days, because we are affiliated but believe each other simply to be mistaken. We agree that God is one but disagree on the culture in which one God might best be worshipped. This is not to say that there are not theological differences, but it is to say that Jews and Christians no longer spend their time debating the identity of Jesus as Messiah. We’re still certain that we’ve found him (though in a more abstract way) and many Jews, for all practical purposes, have stopped looking. The hottest of the hot buttons has very much cooled; I will tear this Temple down and rebuild it in three days is not the subject of much popular commentary.
Paradoxically, it seems to be the questions we have not yet settled that have most bitterly divided Christian and Jew, and those considered determined even in disagreement that have allowed our best inter-faith relations. That the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 AD helped to settle those disputes seems highly probable; that the desecration by Gentile armies of the holiest of Jewish holies might have actually helped decide that they would eventually relate to each other in better ways seems more surprising, but nonetheless fortuitous.
Benjamin Shank
That this occurred just as Christianity was trying to define itself and define its relations with Jews might indeed have set them on more swiftly diverging courses. Not only did this force Christians and Jews to physically relocate, it moved the center of the faith for both religions outward from Jerusalem – to the synagogues for Jews, to the Gentiles for the Christians. This meant Rabbis and Bishops as well as Mishna and written Gospels and Epistles placed in the hands of Jewish and Christian congregations alike.
Not that these developments were not parallel – one can readily see that they were – but that the similar developments in both faiths allowed them to become more different and distant over time. Jesus had once spent a lot of time critiquing the Temple system, one that was now forfeit. Even he didn’t argue with the synagogues, so one imagines the Christians finding new ways to occupy their time. Mishna might have continued commentary on the Torah, but Epistles favored commentary on the Gospels. Pauline proclamations of Christ’s sacrifice won out over Jesus’s own proclamations of the Kingdom of God prefigured in the Old Testament. Paul won out over Peter even as Christians claimed the Jewish God-fearers.
How does this affect us today? Well, we don’t circumcise, for starters; we don’t keep kosher, and we certainly don’t think that Leviticus is the center of the Pentateuch. Most of us wouldn’t recognize the Shema if we heard it, and we don’t list among our creeds anything about our ancestor being a nomad. The Kingdom of God is poorly understood, many believe that Grace replaces rather than fulfills the Law, and we are able to be more distantly sympathetic than intimately opposed to our Jewish associates.
Both Christians and Jews, for example, await the ingathering of the other at the end of days, because we are affiliated but believe each other simply to be mistaken. We agree that God is one but disagree on the culture in which one God might best be worshipped. This is not to say that there are not theological differences, but it is to say that Jews and Christians no longer spend their time debating the identity of Jesus as Messiah. We’re still certain that we’ve found him (though in a more abstract way) and many Jews, for all practical purposes, have stopped looking. The hottest of the hot buttons has very much cooled; I will tear this Temple down and rebuild it in three days is not the subject of much popular commentary.
Paradoxically, it seems to be the questions we have not yet settled that have most bitterly divided Christian and Jew, and those considered determined even in disagreement that have allowed our best inter-faith relations. That the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 AD helped to settle those disputes seems highly probable; that the desecration by Gentile armies of the holiest of Jewish holies might have actually helped decide that they would eventually relate to each other in better ways seems more surprising, but nonetheless fortuitous.
Benjamin Shank
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