In 10 principles for reading the Bible in a postmodern context, Andrew proposes that contributors to an emerging post-evangelical theology adopt Principle 2 - "Let’s pretend it’s not inerrant." He suggests that we "set aside claims to the predetermined inerrancy and sanctity of the Bible, at least insofar as such claims force upon us standards of truthfulness that conflict with criteria of thought that we are not prepared to abandon in other areas of discourse (scientific, historical, literary, social, etc.)." Adopting Principle 2 "allows us to read the Bible as the unbeliever reads it; it helps to defamiliarise the Bible for us, which will be an essential aspect of the deconstruction process…" In the Genesis 1 as True Myth post we’ve been trying to make literal sense of the Biblical creation narratives. What if instead we were to read Genesis 1-3 in light of Principle 2?
Certain features of the Biblical creation story read like a fairy tale. Snakes probably didn’t lose their legs because their crafty primal ancestor tempted Eve in the Garden. It’s unlikely that either eternal life or the knowledge of good and evil could be attained by eating fruit from specific trees. It’s implausible that the first woman was formed from a rib bone extracted from the first man. We can’t know for sure whether the original tellers of these tales believed their literal historicity. It does seem likely, though, that they would have wondered about why and how things came to be the way they were. The Scriptural cosmogonies might be regarded as thought experiments, speculations about how the present reality might have emerged out of some hypothetical past reality.
Why do people just seem to hate snakes? That’s a pretty good question, but it’s not nearly as compelling as some of the other questions implicitly posed in Genesis 1-3. Why is there something instead of nothing, and why does it seem to organize itself so conveniently into light and darkness, earth and sky and sea? We humans are impressive, nearly godlike in our ability to create things and to understand right and wrong. But we die like beasts instead of living eternally like gods — why? And knowing the good doesn’t seem to translate into doing the good, rather than the merely desirable or expedient — why not?
Other questions implicit in the text don’t come as readily to our minds. Is there one god in Genesis 1-3, or many? Do these gods transcend time and space, or are they corporeal beings who emerge out of the formless void? When Yahweh tells Adam that he will surely die on the day he eats of the tree, is this a threat or a warning? When Yahweh says that "the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil," do the gods wish they’d never acquired this knowledge either? Must the gods also eat from the tree of life in order to stay alive? Genesis 1-3 doesn’t answer any of these questions. Maybe they too were matters of speculation among early theologians, subjects of thought experiments that were subsequently either resolved or abandoned. It’s readily acknowledged that the details of Genesis 1 creation don’t easily match up with the Genesis 2-3 story. Many such stories may have been told among the ancient Semitic tribes, and for some reason only these two wound up in the Canon. Other cultures have asked many of the same questions; their thought experiments generated answers that are both similar to and different from the ones recorded in the Bible creation narratives.
It’s become nearly untenable to read Genesis 1 as a literal account of how the material universe came into existence. Whatever existed or happened prior to the formation of the current universe, astrophysicists are unlikely to discard the theory that it expanded rapidly from a Big Bang and gradually organized itself into stars, galaxies, and planets. Evolutionary theory undergoes continual revision, but it’s extremely unlikely that the theory itself - gradual genetic change across multiple generations predicated on random variation and environmental adaptability - is going to be debunked or overthrown by a radically different scientific paradigm. Ethologists and psychologists are identifying ways in which language, fabrication of tools, even morality may have evolved from more primitive related capacities in other primates. In short, the Biblical thought experimenters’ speculations about the beginning were almost surely wrong.
Suppose, in keeping with Andrew’s Principle 2, the emerging church were to acknowledge what is most likely the case; namely, that Genesis 1-3 are myths in the usual sense of the term: works of individual or collective imagination, speculative attempts to explain mysteries in the absence of adequate information. Does this acknowledgment push the post-evangelicals down the slippery slope to liberalism and agnosticism? Does it open the possibility of dialog with skeptics for whom belief in the creation narratives constitutes an unjustifiable abrogation of scientific truth?
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
I’ve been having a vigorous exchange of views with Mike Macon on his blog about John’s use of Principle 2. I’ll admit to getting rather too worked up by these conversations, but I do think that they’re important.
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
Well that’s one thing that can happen by asking the question. Here you’ve got a blog and I’ve got a blog and where does the topic end up getting discussed? On the blog of some sarcastic wise-ass fundamentalist trolling for thoughts to ridicule without even bothering to think about them.
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
Oops, I guess that wasn’t very Christian of me, was it? I dropped a comment on Mike Macon’s blog just to put in my $0.02 worth.
inerrancy debates
The discussion rages on at Mike Macon’s blog, to which Andrew provide a link in his first comment. Attention is focused not on the creation narratives but on inerrancy and Andrew’s Principle 2 of an emerging Biblical hermeneutic: "Let’s pretend it’s not inerrant." Mike says this:
To which Andrew replies:
Mike parries thusly:
Then after a bit of semi-tangential wrangling Andrew says:
Mike again:
'story' as thought experiments
John, in regard to your statement:
“Suppose, in keeping with Andrew’s Principle 2, the emerging church were to acknowledge what is most likely the case; namely, that Genesis 1-3 are myths in the usual sense of the term: works of individual or collective imagination, speculative attempts to explain mysteries in the absence of adequate information.”
I like what you have to say, but I wonder if the emerging church perspective should even be approached as you suggest. In other words, to decipher what is factual or nonfactual in regard to Genesis 1-3 seems more of a modernist experiment, whereas the emphasis on narrative apart from ‘claim’ investigation is more post.
I suppose an example might be in hearing one of Jesus’ parables, the recipients probably didn’t question if the parable was true in a factual sense, but rather, the questions were about how the parable is to be understood. the discussion is still about truth… but the supposition derives from a different framework.
just some thoughts…
vapor
Re: 'story' as thought experiments
when discussing plato (whose writings he had spent his life studying and teaching) derrida would always say that reading him was “always before me”, a task yet to be done, never one having been accomplished.
this article gives us (for whom familiarity has bred, if not outright contempt, certainly and unshockable complacency) a way of reading the text and having the text read us. it enables us to be shocked by the loose ends we always supposed were neatly tied. to be confounded, offended, challenged, changed.
as many more eloquent have noted before: scripture is not written as propositional statements, but (to borrow from martin amis) in “the slippery language of story”.
shane magee
director: fake
w: fakerepublic.com
narrative integrity
"to decipher what is factual or nonfactual in regard to Genesis 1-3 seems more of a modernist experiment, whereas the emphasis on narrative apart from ‘claim’ investigation is more post."
I can see how it’s important to understand what a text means before carving it up into propositional truths. Genesis 1-3 certainly reads like narrative, with distinct characters participating in sequences of events. The straightforward meaning isn’t hard to discern. But is this narrative true, did these characters really participate in the events as described in the text? The usual mythic dodge is to de-narrativize the narrative, to say that what it "really" means is that the one true God somehow created the universe, that the details of the story aren’t really important. This move denies the narrativity of the narrative, transforming it into an underlying propositional truth.
If the events of the Biblical creation narratives really happened there’s no compelling need to turn the text into doctrinal propositions. If it didn’t really happen then we can just read it as a fictional tale. Which is it? How do you maintain the integrity of the narrative without addressing its historicity? I’m suggesting that, based on scientific evidence, the creation story is unlikely to be a historical narrative. So why not just call it a fictional story. Maybe some other meaning can emerge if we stop expecting this narrative to be a description of actual events.
Parables are a good example of the challenge in upholding narrative vis-a-vis propositional truth. Jesus tells a story, but it’s clearly a made-up tale, a fiction. Then Jesus says what the story means in terms that no longer rely on the narrative structure. I.e., he uses the narrative as an engaging context in which to embed propositional truths.
inerrancy debates
This comment has been moved here.
slippery slopes
There exists tremendous fear of sliding down slowly and surely all the way to hell. It is a very powerful fear indeed and speaks volumes for the intellectual insecurity and unbelief of the proponenets. It speaks too of what we have reduced "Christian Ministry" to.
Nonetheles, many millions of us Christians seem to have decided that it’s safer to shut off our minds than to ultimately trust God and the blood of Jesus and the advocacy and help of the Holy Spirit to get us to heaven. Indeed it is even feared that God will suddenly change His mind, get angry, and consign us to hell or worse, to whatever netherworld is reserved for the backslidden.
Given that this fear is actively propagated by those who cynically use it as the main platform of their "ministries" I don’t think that discussions will be immediately fruitful, still, I do believe that we are obligated to engage in discussion, at least from the hope that fellowship can be established and perhaps even strengthened.
Increasingly I am coming to the conclusion, in my own eccentric style, that we are never in any position to make the believer vs. nonbeliever distinction. That privilege (if it exists at all) would have to be God’s.
Then, you also bring up the fascinating question of perspective. It is ordinarily difficult for us to be aware of the structure of our own biases, worldviews, and interactive patterns, while reading any text. To be able to change ones perspective, even theoretically-temporarily, does demand a certain amount of self awareness. It also demands that we develop a sensitivity to figuring out the same sort of things about the author’s, and other’s perpective. Examining a text from various angles, seeing how others with different sets of tools may view the text, and so on, would be very valuable if we were actually able to do this.
I suggest though that it’s a tall order, even for a scholar. The best that can be hoped for with the average sam is that I would inculcate a sensitivity to the fact that there are different legitimate perspectives ‘out there’ and that dialogue is needed for there to be understanding and that I must suspend my disbelief (in the other’s genuineness) and mu innate suspiciousness, at least until I reach a better understanding of how ‘they’ got to where they are at.
I might even, in the intervening period, pehaps find that the other also has struggles that I can identify with, and perhaps without my even wanting to, we may become friends who agree to disagree, but still uphold one another as we walk towards wherever God is taking us, together.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Slippery Slope as theme park ride
So let’s take an imaginary ride down the slippery slope of errancy, like a Christian theme park ride, with simulated thrills but no danger. Here’s a start…
Maybe 200 years ago it would still have been possible to assert that the universe came into existence all at once and very recently, and that humans didn’t evolve from primates. Since then science has worked long and hard at understanding events covered in the Bible in just a couple of ancient pages. The scientific account of cosmogony diverges widely from the Biblical account, and that divergence is buttressed by an ever-increasing body of evidence.
Many emerging Christians are less wedded to a doctrine of inerrancy than their more conservative evangelical brethren, asserting that faith rests on a three-legged stool of Scripture, the internal witness of the Spirit, and the communal witness of the church. So, suppose Christians were to let the creation narratives go, rather than trying to defend their literal truth through implausible quasi-scientific distortions or asserting that their truth lies somewhere other than in their narrative historicity. What might the consequences be?
Outside of Genesis 1-3 there’s practically no information presented in the Hebrew Scriptures about how God created the material universe. Still, the Old Testament presents a consistent picture of Yahweh as Lord of heaven and earth, both creator and renewer of all things. So chopping the first three chapters off the Torah wouldn’t destroy the pervasiveness of the Biblical image of God as creator.
It’s conceivable that all subsequent Scriptural allusions to the creator-God are actually commentaries on Genesis 1-3. However, while the creation narratives are placed at the beginning of the Bible, it’s not certain that they were written first. A prior conviction that God created the universe may well have inspired the writers of Genesis 1-3 to speculate on how and when it happened.
There’s a persistent Judaic tradition upholding the belief that Yahweh created the material universe, and the pervasiveness and persistence of this communal belief colors both Old and New Testament writings. Abandoning the Genesis 1-3 description of how God created the universe wouldn’t necessarily result in abandoning the belief in a creator-God. So far the ride down the slippery slope isn’t a very bumpy one.
Creator-God in the New Testament
Continuing our imaginary ride down the Slippery Slope…
In continuity with the Hebrew Scriptures, the writers of the New Testament acknowledge God as creator of the material universe. The main elaboration on the Old Testament is to associate Christ with the creation event. The most obvious and extended illustration is the first chapter of the Gospel of John, a lyrical passage that places Christ at the beginning as mediator of the creation. In I Cor. 8:6 and Colossians 1:16-17 Paul reiterates John’s linking of Christ with the God of creation. None of these NT references to God as creator depends on the specific sequence of events laid out in the Genesis 1-3 narratives.
Other NT citations might be pertinent here, but for now the ride down the Slippery Slope remains a smooth one. The next stretch of the course takes us into scriptural passages that cite or allude explicitly to the details of the Genesis 1-3 narrative…
Christ as mediator and firstborn of creation
Before moving on to specific citations of the Genesis 1-3 narrative in the New Testament, I want to take a little closer look at ways in which the Old Testament idea of creation is modified in the New.
In my last comment I noted that Paul and John place Christ at the beginning with God as mediator of the creation. This move pulls Christ out of his incarnation in a specific place and time, making him equal or identical to Yahweh himself. It also establishes Christ as mediator not just in the specific context of the Mosaic covenant but all the way back to the beginning. Presumably, then, whenever mediation between God and the world has taken place in history, Christ-as-God has been the mediator.
However, in a well-known passage Paul says that there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (I Timothy 2:5). Not Christ as God, but Christ as man, is mediator. We’re entering into nuances of Christian trinitarian theology here: whenever Christ-as-God has served as mediator between God and men, or even between God and the creation, has he always done so in the form of Christ-as-man? Is the second person of the trinity, "the Word" in John’s terminology, eternally man as well as God?
This is the kind of question I suspect the early church fathers and the medievalists wrestled with at length. I don’t know what they decided. Every time God and man interact directly, God makes himself accessible on human terms: he speaks in human language that humans can either hear or read; sometimes he makes himself visible to human eyes; he causes events to happen in the material world that can be perceived by humans. Maybe this sort of mediation between divine and human is always the work of Christ as the eternally human.
Christ isn’t just the mediator of creation in the NT; he’s also the firstborn of creation.
We might hypothesize that, for Paul, God began the creation by entering into the to-be-created material world in the person of Christ. Christ the material mediator of creation is "the image of the invisible God." But Christ is also firstborn of creation: man comes into the world in the image of the firstborn, as a material manifestation of the invisible God.
None of this speculation directly contradicts the Old Testament. None of it relies directly on the Genesis 1-3 narratives. I don’t think any of it contradicts orthodox Christian teaching. Or am I mistaken?
Re: Christ as mediator and firstborn of creation
John, beginning with the beginning, what would be lost with the first three chapters of Genesis is preciseley the beginning of the story. It seems strange that you are particular about these first three chapters, why not the 4th, 5th… Seems to me that if one wants to say that it’s a fictional story, the sensible thing to do will be to declare it all fictional until proven otherwise and take the bible as primarily a story about God and His people.
The fact is that there is no proof that Moses or Joshua, or David, or Solomon existed any more than there is that Eve or Adam were historical figures.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Why only Genesis 1-3?
"It seems strange that you are particular about these first three chapters."
I suppose most theological controversies seem strange to those who aren’t much interested in them. Genesis 1-3 seems to be a narrative describing how the material universe and humankind came to be. Suppose you are persuaded — as I am — that the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution are at least pretty close approximations to what happened in the beginning. A couple of exegetical options are available: contort the Biblical creation narrative to conform to the scientific one, or regard it as a metaphorical story that doesn’t really describe the historical creation at all. You, I, and others have investigated these two options in some detail in the True Myth post here at OST. A third option is to dismiss the historicity of Genesis 1-3 in its entirety, which is what I’m exploring here.
The historicity of individual people and the migrations of groups of people have few if any general scientific implications. Instead of riding all possible slippery slopes toward discounting the Bible on more general grounds, I’m suggesting that the very top of the slide is a particularly perilous passage. So I’m looking for a bypass. It appears that so far I’m the only one who’s interested in this experiment here at OST, but I think I’ll carry on for awhile.
Is Christ eternally human?
The New Testament places Christ at the beginning as both mediator and firstborn of creation. According to orthodox theology the incarnate Christ is both God and man, eternally. What about before the historical incarnation as Jesus of Nazareth: did the second person of the Trinity always already partake of both natures, even from the beginning as "firstborn"?
John says that the Word was with God and was God in the beginning, and that the Word "became flesh and dwelt among us" This passage suggests that Christ’s "wordness" is eternal from the beginning but his "fleshness" began at a particular moment in history. The incarnation was foreknown before the foundations of the world (Eph. 1:4, I Peter 1:20), but before the actual 1st century events the person of Christ must have been something other than flesh and blood.
If Christ is inseparably both man and God, the incarnation event must have changed the eternal Christ in essence. But how could that be the case if Christ is God and God is eternally the same? Did the eternal God in effect "possess" the body of Jesus, thereby transforming and eternalizing that body and merging it with eternal God-ness? And if the incarnation permanently fused God and man in the person of Christ, is it accurate to say that God suffered in the flesh and died on the cross? These were hot topics for debate in the early church, resulting in not a few condemnations and excommunications and a lot of complicated explanations.
Rather than trying to sort it out now, I’ll leave it at this: the idea of Christ as mediator with the creation and with human beings helps resolve difficulties of how a purely spiritual, transcendent, eternal and perfect God could have any commerce with an imperfect, temporal, material world. But solving this problem opens up a different set of problems that have no easy or intuitive solution. However, this distinctly Christian theological concern is not substantively affected by the details of the creation narrative in the Hebrew scriptures.
Re: Is Christ eternally human?
Interesting questions.
I agree. I think there is a difference between the pre-incarnate logos and the flesh, the soul, that logos became in the first century, Jesus.
Was Jesus eternally inseparably both man and God? I don’t think so.
I think it is more accurate to say that God’s son, who is in effect God in the flesh, suffered on the cross.
Your questions were very complicated and thought provoking, so I’m afraid my small answers are not that great. Can anyone else add some thoughts?
Re: Is Christ eternally human?
I agree that the questions raised are interesting and thought provoking, and I assert that the thinking provoked has been mostly already been done by others.
I venture to guess that there is no question raised that can be answered on any other basis than faith.
So, pick your mental torment.
Moltmann says that God died on the Cross. It is consistent with his notion of a triune God. Does that mean that the Holy Spirit also died on the Cross? Were there three days, therefore, when the world, the universe was without God? I wonder.
Please do not read into these comments any cynicism. It is always hard to tell mental states of people posting on the internet. I offer the comments humbly and without agenda.
Re: Is Christ eternally human?
Enarchay says, "God’s son, who is in effect God in the flesh, suffered on the cross." If God suffered in the flesh, did God also die in the flesh? In Christianity God is triune, so even if God died in his incarnate form He wouldn’t have died altogether — the Father and Spirit would have carried on. And Christ was resurrected, so he didn’t stay dead.
As Shiert says, "I assert that the thinking provoked has been mostly already been done by others." I’d warrant that this statement would apply to most of the topics addressed on OST, but that doesn’t seem to stop us from doing our own thinking as well. Here I’m looking only tangentially at certain implications of the New Testament placing Christ at the scene of the creation. The historical incarnation presents its own complications. The "Ave Maria" prayer, which I memorized as a small child, contains the line "Holy Mary, Mother of God…" Is that right? Did the incarnate Christ have both a divine and a human will? Does the resurrection body of Christ participate in the divine nature, such that it can in effect be omnipresent in the Eucharist (Luther thought so)? And so on. I’m a psychologist by training and inclination, so these kinds of ideas fascinate me. In light of postmodernism’s "decentered self" as explored by Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and others, I’d think maybe an emerging theology might find it worthwhile to revisit some of these premodern controversies about the nature and selfhood of Christ.
"I venture to guess that there is no question raised that can be answered on any other basis than faith," Shiert continues. I wonder: without the long theological tradition attempting to understand the rather sketchy New Testament passages, and without the creeds that formalized certain majority (though not consensual) positions of the early church fathers, what would a Christian by faith believe about the nature of Christ?
The New Testament augments the creation story in another way that’s worth noting at least in passing. The Old Testament offers no knowledge about what God was doing prior to the creation. But in passages like Mat. 25:34 and Eph. 1:4 God is already preparing his kingdom for the elect in Christ "before the foundations of the earth." Genesis 1 starts right off with the creation event; John 1 starts with 2 verses showing God and the Word together before the creation begins. In John 17:24 Christ prays to the Father: for Thou didst love Me before the foundation of the world.
So the New Testament implicitly answers a couple of questions: (1) Did God exist before the creation? Answer: yes, and Christ did too. (2) Was redemption through Christ a new plan tacked onto Judaism? Answer: no; Christianity in effect preceded Judaism in the foreknowledge of God.
Re: Is Christ eternally human?
John, I’ve been feeling a bit at sea with this discussion precisely because you have been revisiting premodern and modern theological speculations. Most of what was considered Christian Theology, especially anything smacking of being systematic has rightly been pulled onto the carpet for a closer look by our postmodern selves.
In fact there are large swathes of scripture (not just the creation stories) that can be happily jettisoned if what one is after is to retain an orthodox sort of theology. Such theological speculation has always been about using prooftexts as props with utter disregard for chronicity or context.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Is Christ eternally human?
I’m trying neither to prop up orthodoxy nor to kick the props out from under it, Sam. In the inerrancy discussion it was proposed that the Christian faith stood on a three-legged platform of Scripture, community, and inner conviction. Since the first century the community has tried to understand who Christ is, and the creeds, like the Scriptures themselves, came forward from within the community. Whether the tradition got it right or not isn’t the central focus of this particular thought experiment, but in passing we can recognize some of the complexities with which Christian theologians have wrestled over the centuries.
In a different experiment we might explore whether some of the prooftexts might have been inserted for polemical purposes; e.g., to add weight to Christ’s claims to divinity and his priority over the Law. We could also explore whether the orthodox creedal statements might have unjustly suppressed alternative opinions. But again, that’s not the central focus.
Re: Is Christ eternally human?
I think of the logos made flesh, the soul, Jesus, dying, but not God (independent of flesh) himself dying.
narratives and propositions
In our tentative efforts to understand how Christ’s divine and human natures combine in one self we follow in the footsteps of the earliest Christian thinkers, who attempted to convert relatively sparse Scriptural clues into systematic propositional truth statements about the Trinity and the incarnation. Alternative propositional formulations were debated in the early Church Councils, with the "winners" being formalized as communal statements of faith in the Creeds while the "losers" were consigned to perdition and neglect. One could even say that the writers of the epistles were theologians of this sort, explaining propositionally what God had been doing in humankind through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, spiritedly countering the arguments of those who disagreed with them.
The transformation of Biblical narratives into propositional truth statements thus long predates the modern era. Perhaps the postmodern call for a return to narrative is an attempt not to emulate early church praxis but to avoid the divisiveness that has from the beginning accompanied the "propositionizing" of faith.
Re: narratives and propositions
A new struggle emerges around propositionizing versus narrativizing truth. Divisiveness isn’t escapable. Contention only shifts around different topics and gives form to different readings and constructions of faith, church and God.
The Word as Creator
Would the Gospel of John begin the way it does if Genesis 1 hadn’t been part of the Torah? The structural parallel is unmistakable: both passages begin "in the beginning," both speak of God’s creation of the universe.
Does John’s reference to Christ as the Logos — the Word — rely on the Genesis creation narrative? That’s less clear. God certainly speaks words in Genesis 1, but the writer never says anything about "the word of God." Rather the creation formula is "God said… and there was." The Biblical use of "said" isn’t distinctive to God: in Genesis 3 the woman "said" to the serpent, the serpent "said" to the woman, the man "said" to God, etc. And while God’s words seem to have creative force in Genesis 1, the writer certainly never personifies God’s words the way John personifies the Logos. Neither does any other Old Testament writer, for that matter. Nor does any New Testament writer other than John.
Still, is it likely that the writer of the fourth Gospel drew his inspiration for this unique idea of Jesus as the Word from the Genesis 1 creation formula, wherein what God says comes into being? It’s hard to say for sure, but apparently not. John makes repeated references to God’s words
and even Jesus’s words, without ever repeating the personification of
Word from the first chapter. For John, "the Word" doesn’t just mean what God says — he seems to have a larger, more abstract concept of Logos in mind.
Long before Christ the Greeks imbued the word logos with philosophical importance. For Heraclitus (6thC BC) logos meant relation, proportion, meaning, universal law, truth. For Socrates (5thC BC) intellectual reflection through dialogue discovers the logos, the community understanding, of things. In the ancient mystery cults the lesser deities are said to have become logos, bringing form to the world, mediating between God on one side and matter/man on the other. The Hellenistic Jews of Jesus’s time associated Logos with the personified Wisdom of Proverbs 8 who existed with God before the creation. In sum, John’s applying the term Logos to Christ as God and Creator probably did not derive from his interpretation of Genesis 1.
Re: The Word as Creator
Does John’s reference to Christ as the Logos — the Word — rely on the Genesis creation narrative?
I think there is a connection other than just the word "logos" which itself is not directly equivalent to God;s sayings in the creation. Jesus is specifically linked to and made the instrumentality of the creation with the logos concept: "all things were made by him and without him was not any thing made that was made" and that certainly does ‘rely’ on Genesis 1 while at the same time reinterpreting the act of creation.
The other remarkable coincidence is the use of "light" and "life" and again, John freely reinterprets in a Targumic style both contemporising and effectively using the logos concept (whatever it is) to organically link Christ back to before the beginning of Genesis 1. There certainly are strong and deliberate echoes of Genesis in John’s Prologue and I think that a lot of the depth of meaning that is there in these few verses comes from the linkages with the creation account.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: The Word as Creator
Linking Jesus to the creation assumes that God created the universe, which is asserted in other parts of the Old Testament besides the first 3 chapters of Genesis.
I agree that John 1 was influenced by Genesis 1. The main issue is whether any crucial truths of John 1 rely on Genesis 1. So in John 1:4-5 —
— we see, as you point out, a parallel to the creation of light in Genesis 1. But in Genesis 1 the light is created by God; in John 1 the light is the life of God. I don’t think John meant for his readers to reinterpret the creation narrative more pantheistically based on this lyrical passage he has written. John says that "the darkness did not comprehend" the light, implying a metaphorical interpretation of light (life, truth, etc.) and darkness (sin, ignorance, etc.) that certainly isn’t evident in Genesis 1. Is John suggesting that his readers interpret Genesis 1 metaphorically rather than literally? I don’t think so, since he already asserted that "all things came into being through Him." I suppose it’s just possible that John is reflecting a common understanding that, while God did create everything, the Genesis 1 story isn’t a literal account of the creation event. That would be interesting.
My sense of it is that John 1 is, as you say, a reinterpretation and contemporization of Genesis 1. His main interest isn’t to elaborate on the creation but to introduce the incarnation. The incarnation is continuous with the creation in the sense of God repeatedly intervening in the world of men through the mediation of Christ.
Re: The Word as Creator
A few more thoughts about the beginning of John’s gospel before we move on. Many can recite the first verse by heart:
In direct translation from the Greek it reads more like this:
Why "toward"? One might think that, in the context of creation established in the first few verses of John, the Word would be facing outward from God toward the world. Maybe, as mediator between God and man, the Word stands on the side of man looking toward God. Toward may also imply movement: the Word as mediator brings man toward God.
"The God" is the usual Greek expression for God in John as elsewhere in the NT. E.g. John 3:16: For the God so loved the world; John 4:24: The God is spirit… So in John 1:1, should the reader infer anything from the omission of the definite article in equating the Word with God? John doesn’t use an indefinite article here — "the Word was a God;" rather, there is no article at all. Some commentators suggest that, without the article, a noun carries adjectival meaning: "the Word was divine." But there is an adjectival form in Greek, so why didn’t John just use that?
It should be recognized that in Greek "god" is a title or category, like lord or father. Yahweh is the name of the Jewish god, THE god. But again, if John meant that the Word was A god, why not use the indefinite article?
Another possibility is to regard "god" as a category of being. The word "man" is used this way: with either a definite or indefinite article — A man or THE man — this word refers to an individual representative of the species. But "man" without an article refers to the entire category of mankind. So perhaps John is saying that Jesus is god in the same sense that he is man: he participates in the nature of god-ness just as he participates in human nature.
On the other hand, the absence of the definite article might mean nothing in particular. Maybe it was just a stylistic nicety John inserted in his rather lyrcial introduction to his gospel. As Sam pointed out a few comments ago, prooftexting in order to justify or refute doctrines can be a dicey proposition.
It is on exegetical nuances like this one that the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses diverge from the orthodox trinitarian doctrine of Christianity.
John 1:1c - "a god."
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
An informative and helpful comment, Alan. You bring up the important grammatical point that Greek had no indefinite article, so if someone wanted to refer to A god rather than THE god s/he would simply omit the definite article. Alternatively, the omission could also be emphasizing the essential godliness of the Christ. As Zerwick puts it:
Zerwick’s book on NT Greek usage was the "bible" in evangelical seminaries in my day — maybe it still is. Zerwick was a scholar at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in the Vatican, so his work spans both the Catholic and the Protestant theological worlds.
I wondered whether the insistence on Christ as THE God in trinitarian theology might have reflected linguistic confusion among early Church scholars. At the time the NT was written Greek rather than Latin was in effect the "lingua franca" of the Empire. Greek was also the language of scholarship, such that even in Rome the educated classes could speak Greek. However, as the Empire expanded Latin became the primary language spoken in the new Western provinces. The Church, always divided to an extent between east and west, split more decisively when the Roman center of the western branch moved decisively to Latin. The western churchmen began relying more heavily on various Latin translations of Greek NT fragments, culminating in Jerome’s consolidated Vulgate in the 5th century. Whereas Greek used a definite article but not the indefinite article, Latin had neither. Imagine the confusion of the early Latinate theologians trying to arrive at a determinative interpretation of John 1:1 having neither "a" nor "the" at their disposal!
However, the eastern branch of the Church, reading the NT in their native Greek, also asserted a trinitarian understanding of God. So even though they probably didn’t read John 1:1 as Biblical proof that Jesus is one in being with Yahweh, they nonetheless asserted the equivalence of three persons in the one God in the same way as the Western church.
Presumably the early Christian theologians were trying to reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable points: there is only THE God, but Christ is ALSO God. In the doctrine of the Trinity they arrived at a synthesis. That they could formulate such a complex understanding of the nature of God testifies either to the intrinsic complexity of the Godhead who reveals Himself in the threefold witness of Scripture, community, and sensus divinitatis, or to the intrinsic complexity of the human mind that through detailed investigation of the Biblical texts, sophisticated reason, and unbridled imaginion could arrive at such a remarkable reconciliation. It remains to be seen whether the emerging church will reconsider the traditional trinitarian understanding, and also whether it will continue to insist on trinitarian belief as one indicator of being a "true" Christian. I supsect that if one were to ask ordinary Catholic or Protestant churchgoers about the Trinity they wouldn’t "get it right" anyway.
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
Dear Mr. Doyle,
With regard to your quote of Zerwick, it may interest you to know that, within "Appendix 6A Jesus-A Godlike One; Divine," of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ New World Translation, 1984 Edition, they explain much the same as Zerwick above:
~~~~~
John 1:1 – "and the Word was a god (godlike; divine)"
Gr[eek], kai the ·os’ en ho lo’gos
"…the Greek word the ·os’ is a singular predicate noun occurring before the verb and is not preceded by the definite article. This is an anarthrous the ·os’. The God with whom the Word, or Logos, was originally is designated here by the Greek expression ho the ·os’, that is, the ·os’ preceded by the definite article ho. This is an articular the ·os’. Careful translators recognize that the articular construction of the noun points to an identity, a personality, whereas a singular anarthrous predicate noun preceding the verb points to a quality about someone. Therefore, John’s statement that the Word or Logos was "a god" or "divine" or "godlike" does not mean that he was the God with whom he was. It merely expresses a certain quality about the Word, or Logos, but it does not identify him as one and the same as God himself."
Taken from: The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures. Revised Edition, 1984. (Brooklyn, New York: Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Brooklyn, 1984), p. 1519. BS195 .N4 1984 / 84-191013. 1984.
The same point is made within their "Reasoning" book:
"The definitive article (the) appears before the first occurrence of theos (God) but not before the second. The articular (when the article appears) construction of the noun points to an identity, a personaltiy, whereas a singular anarthrous (without the article) predicate noun before the verb (as the sentence is constructed in the Greek [of John 1:1]) points to a quality about someone. So the text is not saying that the Word (Jesus) was the same as the God with whom he was but, rather, that the Word was godlike, divine, a god."
Taken from: Reasoning from the Scriptures. 1st Edition. (Brooklyn, New York: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, International Bible Students Association, c1985, 1989), pp. 212, 213. BS612 .R43 1985 / 85198803.
Agape, Alan.
john1one@earthlink.net
http://www.goodcompanionbooks.com
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
The question is not whether there is good reason to believe (which there is) that there is a distinction between “the God” (i.e. the Father) and the Logos (i.e. Jesus), but whether the Father and Jesus are both equally divine. The normative predicate would suggest Jesus shares the quality of the Father’s divinity. The author of ntgreek.org comments, “In other words, contrary to the thought that ‘since there is no definite article used here it could belittle the fact of the Word being God’, the fact that the word ‘God’ is used first in the sentence actually shows some emphasis that this Logos (Word) was in fact God in its nature. However, since it does not have the definite article, it does indicate that this Word was not the same ‘person’ as the Father God, but has the same ‘essence’ and ‘nature’.”
On the other hand, to take the presence and lack of articles and run with them and claim Jesus is “a god” is to admit John was a polytheist. The doctrine of the Trinity makes sense of how there is one God and yet Jesus is divine. As John portrays Jesus saying, him and the Father are “one.”
N.T. Wright has said, by the time Paul starts writing, if the early Christians had not come up with the doctrine of the Trinity yet, they should have.
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
I would think that, in the context of monotheistic first century Israel, any thoughts of Jesus being divine would have seemed exceedingly strange, if not blasphemous. That’s precisely what we see in the reactions of the Jewish leaders in the gospels. Still, the Old Testament isn’t consistently monotheistic. Yahweh is the god of the Jews, but other tribes and nations have their own gods. These other peoples build idols to honor their gods. Sometimes the idols serve as icons or portals by which gods and men can communicate, but Yahweh is the greatest of the gods. Sometimes the idols are just stone or metal and there are no gods standing behind them, and Yahweh is the only real god.
Jesus seems almost coy about declaring his own divinity, and the writers of the epistles never go into much detail about their understanding of who Jesus is. The idea of multiple persons participating in one being is a pretty abstract idea even in these postmodern times. Smart people who’ve not had extensive exposure to the "trinity theory" — e.g., Jews and Muslims — find it quite counter-intuitive. For Wright to regard the trinitarian idea as so obvious that the first century Christians should have thought of it sounds rather anachronistic to me. A lot of ideas seem obvious after the fact — that’s one sign that it might be a good idea.
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
By the time John starts writing, if the Greeks had not come
up with the indefinite article yet, they should have.
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
Not exactly. N.T. Wright explains, “[In] second-Temple Judaism there were several quite sophisticated ways of speaking of the one God of Israel, the creator, and his close and complex relation to the world. Maintaining a firm hold on God’s transcendence and otherness on the one hand, while simultaneously wanting to express the nearness, love, and activity of this God within the world, many Jewish writings spoke of this in various ways which seemed to have been designed to safegaurd both the actuality of God’s activity and the fact that it was the same God, the creator, the transcendent one, who was acting. What we have in the New Testament, not entirely without precedent in Judaism but nowhere seen with anything like the prominence and emphasis the early Christians gave to it, is the messianic language of the king, seen as YHWH’s ‘son’, taken up and used as a vehicle in exactly the same way” (RSG, Wright 734).
Wright points to Philo, for example:
“Philo Conf. Ling. 62f., quoting Zech. 6.12, which Philo reads as ‘the man whose name is Rising [anatole’. ‘Strangest of titles,’ he comments, ‘if you suppose that a being composed of soul and body is here described. But if you suppose that it is that Incorporeal one, who differs not a whit from the divine image, you will agree that the name of ‘rising’ assigned to him quite truly describes him. For that man is the edlest son, whom the Father of all raised up [aneteile], and elsewhere calls him His first-born, and indeed the Son thus begotten followed the ways of his Father…’ (tr. Colson and Whitaker in LCL)” (Wright 734).
It was not so odd in biblical times. We are told in Genesis Adam and Eve, two separate humans, make up “one flesh.” The Wisdom Solomon describes has part in creation. Jesus says he is “one” with the Father. John describes the logos as theos. I’m pretty sure; moreover, some Jews viewed the Torah as a divine emancipation.
He lays it out, among other places, in Paul in Fresh Perspective. I’ll try to summarize the chapter I am referring to later.
In the meantime, here is a discussion between Wright and Dunn concerning Jesus’ divinity:
“[Wright:] I go back to that again and again: When we look for the self-consciousness of Jesus (and I’m aware of yards of books complaining about that phrasing), I believe, as a historian and as a Christian, that when Jesus came to Jerusalem on that last journey and told stories about a king or a master coming back to see what was going on and to judge people, what he had in mind was to explain what he was doing in coming at last to challenge Jerusalem and to explain it by means of telling stories about YHWH returning to Zion. In other words, as I think I say at one key point in the book (I’d love to know what Jimmy thinks of this), when you go back to the Exodus narratives, YHWH is there as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night with the Israelites in the wilderness. Isaiah 40:5 says:
Then the glory of the LORD will be revealed,
And all flesh will see it together’ (NASB).
But it remains an open question as to what that’s going to look like. I believe, and have argued in detail, that Jesus believed that those prophecies of the return of YHWH, the glory of the Lord returning to Zion would not look like a whirlwind, a fire, Ezekiel’s dynamo picture, but would look like a young Jewish prophet riding in tears on a donkey and going off to have a last meal with his friends and die on a cross.
In other words, I think Jesus was telling stories about God coming back to explain his own return to Jerusalem. That’s where I find very deep and rich, and very, very high Christology in the mind of Jesus himself, which then gives me a bridge to understand all the other hints which have been picked up in other bits of the tradition. Jimmy himself would say, and has said, that you take a thing like Peter’s confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” I take it that means “You are the Messiah.” I don’t think that means “You’re the second person of the Trinity.” Now Matthew maybe already thinks that Peter said more than he knew, and by the time we get to Paul, Paul is construing it as a lot more. But just because I think that doesn’t mean that Jesus didn’t have that sense of his own identity. Jimmy, you might want to come in on this.
Dunn: Yes, there’s no doubt, I think, that from very early days, the first Christians were seeing God in Jesus, seeing Jesus as the human face of God, seeing Jesus as the one who shows them what God is like and all that. And the way in which already in Paul you have Jesus inserted into the Shema: ‘For us there is one God, the Father … and one Lord, Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor. 8:6, NRSV), and so on – that’s really very astonishing (‘An Evening Conversation on Jesus and Paul’).
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
Thanks Enarchay. Perhaps it was the influence of Greek thought, where the relationship between individual manifestations and pure eternal essence led to various understandings of diversity within unity. Perhaps it was an ever-increasing sophistication of Jewish thought. Maybe it was a confluence of these two streams. You refer to Philo, the first century Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, who associated the personified Wisdom of Proverbs 8 with the Greek idea of Logos. It’s as if a dialectic is being worked out here, with various attempts being made at reconciling polytheism with monotheism to arrive at diversity within unity in the godhead.
It’s interesting to read the excerpted conversation between two theologians that you cite. On the one hand, it’s possible to read the New Testment as texts generated by various individuals struggling in their own ways to understand something they cannot quite grasp, which only later becomes consolidated into more systematic theological concepts like the trinity. Alternatively, one can contend that the NT writers were speaking with one voice from within a shared implicit understanding that they didn’t feel the need to explicate systematically, and the job of subsequent readers is to induce what was in the minds of these writers that informed their writings. These two hermeneutical stances also line themselves up in a kind of dialectic.
Jesus cites Gen. 1&2
We’re exploring an alternate universe that’s identical to this one except that the first 3 chapters of Genesis have been snipped off the front of the Bible. So far the differences between universes haven’t been very dramatic. Now we move on to specific citations of the Biblical creation narrative, starting with Jesus’s words as recorded in the Gospels.
As far as I can tell, only once does Jesus refer specifically to Genesis 1-3.
Matthew and Mark both describe and encounter in which the Pharisees ask Jesus if it’s lawful for a man to divorce his wife:
In the first part of the citation, from Genesis 1, Jesus seems to be making a case for gender equality: men shouldn’t be able to act unilaterally in divorcing their wives inasmuch as men and women are equal in God’s creation. If we consider Jesus’s assertion apart from the creation narrative, would we have any trouble with it from a Darwinian perspective? No: ordinarily two species on the same branch of the evolutionary tree diverge from one another gradually, by small increments, rather than because a singe individual, whether male or female, being born markedly different from its parents. Conspecifics can be identified by their ability to reproduce with one another, which of course requires both male and female.
It’s notable that Jesus didn’t cite the Adam and Eve version of the creation, where man precedes woman. Jesus does, however, refer to the aftermath of the creation of Eve, where the Genesis 2 narrator observes that "for this cause" a man shall leave his parents and join himself to his wife. In the original context "for this cause" refers to the idea that man is missing something from himself (i.e., his rib), and that he cannot be complete, or "one flesh" without being (re)joined to woman. Here, however, Jesus conflates the two narratives describing the creation of man, with "for this cause" referring back to the egalitarian version of Genesis 1: because God created humanity as a two-gendered species, the two must come together. This is a biological imperative for any species that reproduces sexually — and Genesis 1 is explicit about the "be fruitful and multiply" capabilities of human males and females.
So, whereas Jesus’s argument depends on the Pharisees’ knowledge of the creation narrative, it doesn’t really depend on the historicity of that narrative.
Again, however, I can’t help but diverge a bit from the trajectory of this post. The thrust of Jesus’s argument isn’t precisely clear to me. Maybe the disciples (as usual) didn’t get it either:
Jesus is saying that the Law accepted divorce as a concession to human frailty. Interestingly, the Pharisees and Jesus refer to the Law as something Moses said, rather than as a commandment from God. The passages Jesus cites from Genesis are descriptive rather than imperative; still, he gives them precedence over the Law. I wonder if he’s saying that, apart from hard-heartedness and the Law, humans are naturally monogamous? Or is he acknowledging that the Law of Moses is a culture-specific ethical code that has no universal applicability?
Pauline sexism
Jesus cited the Genesis 1 creation narrative to assert gender equality in marriage. In contrast, Paul cites the Genesis 2 variant to justify gender inequality in church leadership. The passage is well-known:
Paul begins with a general command ("A woman must…") and ends with a general observation about women ("A woman will be preserved…"). It’s possible that in the "I do not allow" sentence Paul is merely expressing a personal preference for women not to teach or to exercise authority in his ministry. That should be indictment enough, since Paul surely knew that his example carried a lot of weight, and especially since he justifies his stance by invoking God’s creation. If there had been no Adam and Eve story in the Bible, Paul wouldn’t have been tempted to offer up this offensive bit of polemics; he’d have had to justify his predilection for men-only leadership on other grounds.
The Adam and Eve story is, one must acknowledge, rather sexist. The woman is created not for her own sake, but as a helper for the man. God creates Adam directly, whereas Eve’s creation is contingent on that of Adam, accomplished through a thoracic surgical procedure that sounds more like voodoo chicanery than divine intervention. And the fault line of sin is clearly etched in gender politics: if only the woman hadn’t listened to the tempter, if only the man hadn’t listened to the woman… Paul’s inferences from the story are consistent with the story itself.
The idea of the first male of a species preceding the first female makes no real sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Maybe if this second creation narrative had been excised from Genesis Paul might have avoided the temptation to follow its sexist trajectory.
Re: Pauline sexism
John, I haven’t read the whole of this thread, so these comments may be missing the point in some way.
A key observation with respect to both the Genesis narrative and Paul’s use of it in 1 Timothy 2:11-15 is that Eve’s transgression is attributed not to some intrinsic flaw or failing in her but to the cunning of the deceiver. I suppose you could say that both the man and the woman, in their different, ways were susceptible to being misled and both were disobedient, but it is the cunning serpent who is basically blamed for the fiasco (Gen. 3:14).
I argued in Speaking of Women: Interpreting Paul that Paul’s main concern in 1 Timothy 2:11-15 is to restrict the disruptive influence of false teachers, who, it appears (cf. 2 Tim. 3:6-7), had the habit of insinuating themselves into homes by ‘seducing’ susceptible women. In a patriarchal culture that limited their education and exposure to the world, women were much more likely to be deceived. I see this passage as a rather pragmatic measure to keep things under control. He uses the Genesis text somewhat analogically and is careful not to ground this contingent ordering of things in a universal created condition.
The problem, as so often, is that we read these passages through the lenses of our modernist perspective on things. Genesis 2 wasn’t written to address the concerns of a vociferous and over-sensitive egalitarian culture. Yes, the man was formed first, and perhaps that reflects a patriarchal perspective, but the point is not to privilege the man but to highlight the deficiency of his solitary condition. ‘Helper’ does not make the the woman subordinate: the term suggests not the status of the helper but the insufficency of the one helped. The narrative culminates in a profound image of marital union as ‘one flesh’. This is what it is intended to safeguard.
Re: Pauline sexism
"A key observation with respect to both the Genesis narrative and Paul’s use of it in 1 Timothy 2:11-15 is that Eve’s transgression is attributed not to some intrinsic flaw or failing in her but to the cunning of the deceiver."
I agree, Andrew, that you’ve accurately characterized the thrust of the Genesis story, but not of Paul’s reading of that story. It seems to me that, in order to support his position on church leadership, Paul exploits a secondary theme of male dominance that, while not made explicit in the OT text, can be found there.
In I Timothy 2 Paul expresses his unwillingness to have women teach or exercise authority over men. His supporting evidence from the Adam and Eve story is twofold:
1. For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve (I Tim. 2:13). Why would the sequence of creation be important in this context? Paul doesn’t elaborate, but the most obvious interpretation is that precedence in sequence implies precedence in authority, which is Paul’s main thrust here. As you observe, the original narrative emphasizes man’s incompleteness without woman, which is how Jesus uses the story in Mark 10 and Matthew 19. It is Paul who makes explicit the hierarchical asymmetry of Adam being made first. This is an argument for male precedence intrinsic to the created order, prior to the Fall.
(2) And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being quite deceived, fell into transgression (I Tim. 2:14). Here Paul doesn’t even acknowledge that the man too was deceived, that the man too transgressed. In context the implication is clear: when woman took the lead, man fell. Whereas Paul refers to both Adam and Eve, he says nothing about the deceiver or his cunning. Paul is saying explicitly that, even before the Fall, woman was more prone to being deceived than was man; and implicitly he’s saying that, even before the Fall, man was susceptible to woman’s errors in judgment.
"He uses the Genesis text somewhat analogically and is careful not to
ground this contingent ordering of things in a universal created
condition."
If that was Paul’s intent he didn’t do a very good job. The modern egalitarian lens might be the basis for judging Paul’s position as sexist. Nonethelesss, we can through a straightforward reading understand the gist of Paul’s argument stripped of its political incorrectness. One can also infer situation-specific circumstances that may have provoked Paul into making a stronger case against women’s leadership than he might otherwise have done. Nonetheless, by framing his argument in Genesis 2-3 he justifies men’s authority over women not in local church conditions, nor even in the traditional patriarchal culture, but in human nature. And it’s God-created human nature that’s in view here, an intrinsic weakness in woman that precedes and leads to the Fall.
"I see this passage as a rather pragmatic measure to keep things under control."
You bring up a thorny hermeneutical issue here, Andrew. Frequently the NT writers draw inferences from OT texts in order to embed the Gospel in the longer story of God’s dealings with His people. Non-Christian Jews tend to regard these NT inferences as ad-hoc extrapolations intended to support the introduction of alien elements into Judaism, whereas Christians interpret them as definitive statements of God’s original intent revealed only in the fulness of time through Christ. I see no basis within I Timothy for discerning that Paul’s reading of Genesis 2-3 should be read as a pragmatic bit of local polemics rather than as the definitive Christian interpretation of "the story behind the story" in the creation narrative.
if only we had the data
We appear to be back to splitting almost nonexistent hairs. The data is so thin and so contradictory that remaining agnostic really does seemt to be the wiser alternative.
It’s an open question whether Paul is the author of 1Tim. Beyond this with an epistle it’s always wise to remember that we are probably hearing less than one half of a conversation. We do not know anything much about what question was raised nor about the situation within which ‘Paul’ gives his scintillating advice to ‘Timothy’.
If we jump to a school of Paul/diciple of Paul possibility it makes more sense for in many other places Paul (the original) is all for women preaching, teaching, leading and generally exercising whatever gifts they have for the benefit of the ekklesia.
On a more general note, i wonder why we feel that we have to reconcile all these little bits of info into some self-consistent whole? Aren’t we just creating some extra-fertile ground for metanarrative to spring from?
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: if only we had the data
Well Sam, I’m not sure quite how to respond to your comment. I agree that agnosticism is the wiser alternative on all things religious, though that’s probably not your intention. It’s been interesting to observe larger interpretive issues emerging out of minute observations of specific texts that allude to the creation narratives. You warn that attempts to incorporate all the Biblical material into a unified discourse are fraught with difficulties and tend to leave loose ends dangling. It’s certainly not my intent to contribute to the metadiscourse — quite the contrary, in fact. I’m looking for openings that might facilitate a broader-based conversation. We’ve already seen a Jehovah’s Witness participate amicably in the side discussion about John 1:1. The Genesis creation stories are stumbling blocks to the scientifically-minded, and Paul’s apparent sexism offends modern sensibilities. So for that matter does the idea of Biblical inerrancy. In looking at these passages one at a time we can experiment with ways in which the systematic Biblical metadiscourse might be opened up a little, inviting broader participation in an emerging theology. But this is a simulated ride down the slippery slope, and I’ll heed your advice to move on…
Christianity arose inside a traditional male-dominated society. What today we would call sexism is evident even in the Ten Commandments:
We’ve speculated that the Genesis creation narratives might themselves have been invented as thought experiments for explaining the beginning of all things. Maybe Genesis 2-3 — God’s creating of woman from man and Eve’s succumbing to temptation — was a hypothetical explanation for how men came to dominate women in Semitic society. If the Adam and Eve story hadn’t made it into the Torah, "Paul" might have evaded the temptation to reify patriarchally stereotyped sex roles in church polity.
What if sex roles in the church had been established on more evolutionary grounds? Is humanity naturally a male-dominated species? On average human males are bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than females, suggesting that in the evolutionary environment the early hominids formed male-dominated social groupings. If that’s true, and if the Bible asserts that the God-created natural order is good, then on evolutionary grounds the writer of I Timothy might well have contended that the church ought to be led by men.
agnostic Paul
In 1 Cor 11 especially vv 12 - 16, Paul does use a very interesting appeal to nature to bolster his argument about the proper ordering of human relationships according to natural function. The interesting point here, to me, is that Paul specifically invites the reader to judge for herself - an invitation that is not taken seriously at all. He has already stated a priinciple of equality in v11 that is the entirety of his teaching and specifically is given the weightage of "in the Lord" as opposed to all the other speculations and practices of the churches.
This is Paul, the original thinker declaring both his own biases and his conclusion that in Christ there is no ground for differentiation. He clearly delineates what the rule is as opposed to what his speculations are. The rule "in Christ" supercedes al temporal cultural edicts and eventually when all creation does acknowledge the Lordship of Christ, the ethic of God’s kingdom will rule. We have that as our ultimate goal in our fellowship and should be working our way ever towards The Kingdom here on earth.
Within the context of thought experiments, there is no doubt that Paul is doing something very much like what you are describing except that he has only one ultimate goal in mind. Along the way Paul explicitly acknowledges his own limitations and invites the reader to exercise judgement based on the ultimate aim of being one with and "in Christ".
In terms of what we think of as Christianity, as orthodoxy, and as sound doctrine, within our 2k+ years of speculation and finetuning, rereading Paul is actually like reading an agnostic or even like reading an atheist. As we strip off our ‘religion filters’ and try to look at Paul as a thought experimanter par excellence we too should feel afresh that power of thought and his own unifying horizon.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: agnostic Paul
Thanks for calling our attention to this passage, Sam. It’s interesting that you regard Paul’s invitation in I Corinthians 11 to "judge for yourselves" as indicative of his open-mindedness. I see it as an appeal to common sense — literally "judge in yourselves" — which he believes will back up an argument he has just made on various other grounds.
Oh, and by the way, does nature
The issue is, in modern terms, a sort of quaintly archaic one: what should men and women wear on their heads when they go to church? It seems to me that Paul is quite vehement about it: women should have their heads covered, whereas men should not. Here again Paul invokes the Genesis creation narrative in odd ways. Take verses 7-9:
We recall that in Genesis 1:27 the narrator tells us that God created man in His image and likeness, and that He created them male and female. Here Paul restricts God’s "image" the male gender. The hierarchy is explicit: God, man the image and glory of God, woman the glory of man. If we missed his point, Paul now brings forward the same implication of the Adam and Eve story we saw in I Timothy: woman is subordinate to man in the order of creation itself.
Paul then asserts what you’ve termed "the principle of equality," or what I might regard as the principle of interdependence, in verses 11-12:
Immediately, however, Paul returns to his head-covering topic, where we encounter his alleged open-mindedness:
So: Paul argues first from the creation narrative, then from nature, then from custom that women should have their heads covered in church. Those who don’t conform to his head-covering instructions Paul regards as "dishonorable" and "contentious." Certainly Paul is an adventurous and unconventional thinker, but I don’t see it in this passage.
Oh, and by the way, does nature teach us that long hair on a man is dishonorable whereas long hair on a woman is her glory? If it doesn’t, are we without excuse, futile in our speculations, and possessors of foolish darkened hearts (Romans 1:20-21)?
Myth and the Scientific Method
Hello:
I’m quite new to this site, and only superficially aware of the emerging church movement. Lurking, vicarious study, and the trials of careful contemplation one should normally go through before raising his or her voice in a new and strange environment don’t sit well with me, however, so I’m just going to dive right into the discussion and hope for the best. With any luck, nobody will mind too much.
John: I must say, to begin, that I thoroughly enjoyed your post; it was well-written, thoughtful, inquisitive, and it ran entirely contrary to the way I personally think. The mental engagement has been much appreciated.
Though I don’t want to lose the breadth of your post in my main objection to it, I feel as though I should enter into this discussion with the thing that - in my opinion - distinguishes my thought from yours most potently: namely, the way in which you utilize “myth”: relative to truth, and especially relative to science. From what I’ve been able to gather, there exists some sort of an opposition between myth and science in your writing, the one (myth) operating as the inferior, primitive, and essentially incorrect counterpart to the other (science), which exists as a suitable standard of judgement. It is the stock that you appear to put into science - read: the stock that I understand you to be putting into science - that signifies my initial point of departure away from your line of thinking; suffice it to say, I do not see science as the Truth, as a worthwhile truth, nor as a discipline that Christianity, Biblical scholarship and theology should feel compelled to answer to in any way.
I do not believe that I am alone in this stance, though I would imagine that it is a minority point of view: neither conservative nor liberal - contemporary Christianity’s treasured dichotomy - and deeply incompatible with both. Will science and criticism be subverted to the text, or the text be subverted to science and criticism? Nowhere does this dichotomy resonate with me: why should a relationship between Biblical text and positivistic observation be thought of as necessary to begin with?
From any standpoint that accepts the prejudices of science and the scientific method as believable fact, yes: “myth” and “fairy tale” become easy synonyms. It becomes equally easy to equate the formulation of myth with the idea of “thought experiment” (where “thought experiment” appears to represent a sort of primitive scientific method, without proper tools, without proper equations, without… ).
These are, of course, merely the products of the scientific prejudices, the propositions that science assumes to be true, without any definite proof of this being so: assuming the existence of “laws of nature”, assuming that the past is static, assuming an ordered universe, assuming that anomalies are the result of insufficient data or human error (and not, perhaps, fissures within the whole of the scientific method)… science appears to assume a fair bit.
Why is it difficult to believe that woman was formed from the rib of a man, or that snakes lost their legs by means of some gnostic tempter? Difficult to believe, perhaps, because we assume that the world has always operated as it operates now… difficult to believe, perhaps, because we have re-written the past to exclude any sort of space in which this mythology might work. This is the unfortunate poverty of the scientific worldview: this is the reason I have no real love for inerrancy debates, Creation Science, empirical textual criticism or the idea of the stories of the creation as a parable in the service of a creator God. I simply see no reason for Christianity, theology, philosophy, etc., to submit themselves to the haughty authority of the scientific method, author of boring and uninspiring fictions.
The liberty of deconstruction is, for me, the freedom to religion, from positivism and all its bastard children. The gifts of science are not worth its costs, especially as it regards religion.
Begin in Genesis: the world is a formless void. In many ways, it remains a formless void. “Postmodernism” is the opening, the de-formation of the integral reality that modernity has formed for us. Modernity, and its scientific house pets, closed off as much space as they were able in an attempt to, once and for all, define the state of things. Deconstruction is a tool that allows us to re-open the fissures, allow entropy to have its way with our definitions, and create the space required to sustain the existence of God.
Yes: the creation story is a total farce in light of scientific truth. But why allow science the final word? Why allow Carl Sagan to author the universe’s past?
Nature is the imitation of narrative.
Re: Myth and the Scientific Method
I’m glad you’re enjoying the ride down the slippery slide, danielbooy, even if you find it alien to your usual way of experiencing things spiritual.
I don’t think you’re alone in your skepticism regarding scientific discourse. You may be familiar with Lyotard’s famous proclamation: I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. Lyotard’s next sentence reads like this: This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. In other words, science’s pecking away at the religious metanarrative is itself a fruit of the scientific metanarrative. Arguably the converse is also true: religion launches its critiques of the scientific metanarrative from a position within the religious metanarrative.
The traditional evangelical approach to Genesis 1-3 has been to regard the text as inerrant and literally true. Various interpretive moves have been deployed in an effort to bring these narratives into closer conformity with what seems to be the case; namely, that the universe unfolded over billions of years rather than in six literal days. That’s one way to go, and it poses its own problems. At the top of this post I provide a link to another post called "Genesis 1 as True Myth." In that post we’ve explored a recently-ventured paradigm for reading the creation narratives as true without necessarily regarding them as historically accurate. That’s another way to go.
This post explores a third way: scrap the Genesis creation narratives altogether. The string of comments looks at implications for Christianity of performing this textual excision. All three approaches acknowledge that scientific theories and findings conflict with Genesis 1-3, and that the scientists might be right about the "how" and the "when" if not the "who" and the "why."
It might be worth noting that skepticism regarding the Genesis creation narrative isn’t restricted to the modern age. The Epistle of Barnabas, a text most likely written in the early second century that for awhile looked as though it might be included in the NT canon, says this:
Origen, a third-century apologist for the Christian faith, wrestled with some apparent impossibilities in Genesis 1; for example, that God created evening and morning on day one but didn’t create the sun until day three. Origen offered an allegorical, spiritualized interpretation for the entire creation story:
Writing in the fourth century Augustine acknowledged:
And so on — the ancient Church Fathers and medieval Schoolmen offered some very creative "spiritual" readings of Genesis 1-3. It might be worthwhile investigating whether any of these readings can be reinvigorated for contemporary readership — that might be a fourth project, which I probably won’t pursue.
"I simply see no reason for Christianity, theology, philosophy, etc., to
submit themselves to the haughty authority of the scientific method,
author of boring and uninspiring fictions."
Then don’t do it. If you don’t have difficulty believing that the first woman was made
from the rib of the first man, or that snakes crawl on their bellies
because they were cursed by God, then none of these alternative approaches to reading the creation narratives is
going to be of much interest to you. Something like half the adults in America have no problem with the story as written either. The other half of us do.
"The liberty of deconstruction is, for me, the freedom to religion, from positivism and all its bastard children."
I’d say that this post is an exercise not so much in deconstruction but in what Deleuze and Guattari called "deterritorialization" — the effacing of well-worn channels and roadways by which we habitually traverse the world of experience. Scripture, tradition and subjective intuition tend to converge on an "overdetermined" territorialization of Christianity. This post is only one exercise in loosening up the ties holding the structure of the "metanarrative" together — many other such exercises can be imagined. I suspect you’d agree that loosening the structures is often an essential step in re-opening the "formless void" from which the unprecedented emerges.
Re: Myth and the Scientific Method
A slippery slope, you say? I’d welcome any sort of an angle right now; even a slippery slope is a fixed point of some kind…
I’m fairly familiar with Lyotard and The Postmodern Condition, and can most certainly appreciate his sentiments. Personally, I prefer Baudrillard’s description of disgust with regards to Integral Reality (“the irreversible movement towards the totalization of the world”) over Lyotard’s incredulity toward metanarratives as a metaphor of incompatibility with science and the scientific method:
In other words, the unbearable state of the Kansas Board of Education is, for me, matched by its opposition: not one end of the spectrum, nor the spectral extremes, but the entire business of Creation vs. Evolution, Science vs. Scripture, Pistis vs. Gnosis, Dr. Dino vs. Stephen Hawking has become unbearable to me.
I’m not so much searching to find my place amidst the spectrum of the debate; rather, I’m hoping to create enough room for myself in the fissures, to move beyond, below, and away from the whole of the dichotomy altogether. If this is at all going to be possible, responding to the scientific metanarrative with a religious metanarrative won’t be an option. Metanarrative itself will have to be abolished. This, I think, could be considered my “task”, and what I believe to be the best hope for Christianity in the near to distant future.
As far as I can tell, this will not be accomplished by means of any of the three methods you have outlined above. Each of these methods appears, from where I’m sitting, to substitute one Eidetic meta-super-structure for another. While I’m not entirely sure what to propose instead of any of these three options, I am hoping that I’ll be able to figure something out, as I begin to see definitions form out of various differences.
You are, of course, quite right about sceptical attitudes toward the creation narratives in times historical. I’m not convinced that the Epistle of Barnabas represents any meaningful “scepticism” toward the creation narratives (the numerological substitution seems to be primarily eschatological, rather than recollective), though I’d agree with you that the side-remarks of Origen in his description of his flesh/soul/spirit interpretive framework would suggest a scepticism of sorts regarding the creation narratives as literal history. The flesh/soul/spirit framework, it seems, still serves well (cf. “Genesis as True Myth”).
What the adults of America do and do not do is, for good or for ill, none of my business. They’re out of my jurisdiction, and if they’re truly so evenly polarized, it is probably for the best that I have no stake in their decisions. The ability to read the first few chapters of Genesis “literally” (if this is truly what the fundamentalist is doing in reading the creation narratives as propositional, fact-for-fact historical-phenomena) is a peculiarly “American” one (“America” in the world-wide sense), but not – as you well know – a necessary one.
Nor, for that matter, is the scientific-propositional reading a necessary one. Nor, for that matter, is any propositional reading of the creation narratives necessary.
Metaphysics can be overcome.
As for the idea of deterritorialization, I like the comparison: an anthropo-geographic metaphor, as opposed to a literary one. I would retain the idea of deconstruction though – to some degree, at least – largely because I do not necessarily feel as though Scripture itself is a hurdle that need be overcome: there is no text without interpretation.
I would, however, certainly agree that Christianity has been overdetermined, and that it could benefit from some loosening.
http://www.danielbooy.co.nr/
The suPer-EsSential Divine Gloom
Re: Myth and the Scientific Method
I personally don’t think science is the main candidate for becoming the totalizing discourse of our age, in part because so few people can make heads or tails of it. Even scientists in the same field often don’t understand one another’s work. From the outside science looks monolithic but it’s more like a loosely-assembled composite. Rare is the pitched dialectical “throw-down” between
competing theories. In experimentation the battle is typically
waged against “the null hypothesis” = phenomenological randomness. As a going concern, science is characterized by curiosity and provisionality and skepticism rather than doctrinaire totalization.
When I invoke "thought experiment" I’m working along the provisional and speculative face of science rather than aligning with its rigor or demystification. Fiction is another kind of provisional exploration of possibility. Simulation too — which gets us into Baudrillard’s territory. I’ve suggested that this post is a kind of theme-park ride simulating the slippery slope of Biblical "errancy." The overdetermination of Christian reality makes it unlikely that any of these thought experiments or speculative fictions or simulations will have any enduring impact. Maybe that opens the way for having a little bit of fun.
Deconstruction demands very close readings of texts. Derrida said that he only deconstructed important texts that he loved. Augustine was one of his favorites. Embedded in the "true myth" post, partway down the comments, is my deconstructive "alternative literal reading" of Genesis 1 — the link is here.
Do I really believe that my deconstruction is the one true interpretation of the creation story hidden since the foundation of the earth? I kind of wish I could make myself believe that. I’d also like other people to believe it, and for my book about it to get published and become a best seller. I’d become a well-known public intellectual, helping achieve a higher-level reconciliation in the science-versus-faith debates… Maybe that fantasy could be the premise for a novel? Maybe the novel will get published, become a best seller…
Re: Myth and the Scientific Method
Science may never find itself as The Totalizing Discourse of our age and our time, but this has not yet kept Science – as you say, a “loosely-assembled composite” discipline; though I use the term “Science” broadly, generally and treat the composite as a single pneumatic entity, I realize that there are probably more exceptions than rules within the scientific community – from becoming a totality. The totality: essentially any hermeneutic that has transcended the narrative and become a metanarrative; any practise or discipline that no longer has anything on which there is nothing to say.
Science demonstrates that it has overcome its boundaries when it becomes capable of moral judgements, when it equates the universe with cause, effect, and empirical tests. There is no question that science cannot provide a convincing answer to in this hemisphere; the West is convinced of science: our conviction.
Naturally, religion is no less guilty of overcoming the whole of reality via metanarrative: nor democracy, nor Marxism, nor contemporary environmentalism, nor capitalism. Science as The Totalizing Discourse is unlikely, but science as a totalizing discourse is a reality. “There are indeed two powers in heaven!”
Regarding the impact of the thought experiments… who knows? The overdetermination of Christianity is no guarantor of stability, and may yet, in fact, prove to be the factor that begins the system-wide ideological entropy that the world seems to need every now and again – confession of a formerly overdetermined Christian.
Regardless of the outcome, however, I’d say that there’s plenty of room – and plenty of need, as well – for fun.
http://www.danielbooy.co.nr/
The suPer-EsSential Divine Gloom
Re: Myth and the Scientific Method
Danielbooy,
"the entire business of Creation vs. Evolution, Science vs. Scripture,
Pistis vs. Gnosis, Dr. Dino vs. Stephen Hawking has become unbearable
to me"
would be a statement that I think a number of us could very strongly identify with. So, what are the alternatives? Any construct or way of viewing the world is necessarily simulacrum. Perception itself is subtractive and selective in nature. The uncertainties of daily living pile up even when we fail to notice that we are walking a bit too close to the cliff edge.
But, it is precisely here that myth comes to the fore. While not providing a metanarrative, it does provide the anchor points that orient our souls to the deeper, other and differant qualities of realities that exist in dimensions that we cannot precisely delineate.
It is a mistake to try to substitiute myth for truth or vice versa. Both are needed and if you ask me I think we need good myth more than we need whatever we have so far though of as "truth".
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Myth and the Scientific Method
SamLCarr:
Yes, in effect, a construct or worldview is “necessary”; to be without one is to, in my estimation, surrender oneself to a sort of nihilistic abyss of reality, where all is as it is: “a formless void.” At the same time, I think that the attempt to still and quiet the fluctuating chaos of reality-without-definition has tested the limits of humanity’s ability, and found it wanting. The meta-superstructures of definition are impressive things: belief systems that effectively define a linear transition of human progress, that give hope for tomorrow and promise for today, that delegate and relegate convincingly, that define away all the uncomfortable uncertainties.
Buying into these ideologies allows a person a complete worldview; it also keeps him or her away from “the flux” outside at every point and turn. Should the ideology fail, should its thin places and weak spots ever be prodded and exploited, the persons responsible become susceptible to the bare abyss and nihilism outside the ideology.
What is the alternative? I only have ideas, at this point, though they usually begin from the position of wanting to cope with the flux of life, rather than wanting to tame it entirely or negate it altogether; at the end of the day, a few doses of uncertainty may not be the worst thing in the world.
It is for this reason that I like myth. I agree with you: myth is important, especially as I find myself in a land without any sort of mythology to speak of. Our truths are important too, but I’m only really able to give truth a chance when it doesn’t take itself too seriously: when it understands that it has not taken from the tree of life and that it will not live forever.
http://www.danielbooy.co.nr/
The suPer-EsSential Divine Gloom
Re: Myth and the Scientific Method
danielbooy:
Check out my new book on “The Scientific Worldview” at www.thescientificworldview.com. Chapter 3 contains most of my first book on the subject: “The Ten Assumptions of Science.”
Glenn Borchardt
Re: agnostic Paul
Certainly Paul is expressing a very strongly held personal opinion. He often does. But Paul is also engaging in argumentation, as he also does throughout Romans. When Paul feels that there is a teaching of the Lord that clearly applies, Paul doesn’t waste time arguing, he merely points out the teaching and moves on. When his opinion is sought on a matter not covered by any clear principle, then Paul states his ‘opinion’ and argues and invites argument in turn even though his own strongly held views are clearly on display. Paul certainly has the "I’m a bit further along on this road than you" tone but he still leaves these matter ultimately to the reader’s choice and even by stating the dominant principle.
Paul’s own opinion in this passage favors a more traditional and less anticultural route, but then, and this is what is most interesting, Paul himself is not elevating his opinion here to ‘edict’ status, which he almost seems to do in 1Cor 7.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
You all realize, don’t you, that you’re reinventing the wheel here? The question of the genre of Gen. 1-3 (actually Gen. 1-11) has been hotly debated in faith-and-science circles for decades. See, e.g., Answers in Genesis (young earth creationism), Reasons to Believe (old earth creationism) and the American Scientific Affiliation and Christians in Science (mostly theistic evolution), all of which have extensive websites with many articles and book recommendations.
The epistemological questions relating to this also have been thoroughly vetted: see, e.g., Alister McGrath’s “Scientific Theology” series.
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
Reinventing the wheel? Dude, where you been the last 4 weeks? How about putting up a real post telling us the answers? Be assured that, in light of your condescending intro, we’re motivated to rip them to shreds.
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
John, no condescenion intended, and thanks for the warm, hospitable welcome.
I don’t have any “answers.” What I do have is two solid years of wrestling with these issues, in a community of people who have been wrestling with them far longer.
No one as far as I can tell has referenced John Polkinhorne, Alister McGrath, Nancey Murphy, Conrad Hyers, Bernard Ramm, or any other heavyweights in faith-science questions, or the ASA’s journal “Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith,” or CIS’ journal “Science and Christian Belief.” On heremenuetics, there is an interesting discussion now taking place in evangelical circles about the nature and limits of “accommodation” — see Peter Enns’ “Inspiration and Accommodation.”
Anyway, none of this is intended to claim answers, but hopefully to point to some fruitful resources. Does “open source” mean “without reference to anything anyone else has ever said?”
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
You cite a lot of names, dbecke, but offer no ideas. What do any of these people have to say that might contribute to the discussion at hand, which concerns the hypothetical impact on the rest of the Bible of eliminating Genesis 1-3 altogether? Or do these thinkers instead present alternative ways of reconciling Gen. 1-3 with science, or of interpreting these narratives as mythic truths? Those of course are useful topics to pursue as well, but they aren’t the central thrust of this particular post.
I’m not a Christian, so you shouldn’t expect me to be a spokesman for open source Christianity. But you’re welcome to impart some of what you’ve learned over those 2 years, either from the various sources you’ve cited or from your own meditations. You’ll have to acknowledge, though, that dropping a comment saying that we’re reinventing the wheel isn’t a particularly cordial way to enter an ongoing conversation.
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
dbecke:
If Kierkegaard is to be believed, I can’t reinvent the wheel any more successfully than I could take the same trip to Berlin twice. Yes, the question of science and faith has been debated for decades; it’s been debated, in fact, since folks started coming out with the idea that the earth was older than the Bible seemed to indicate, a century and a half ago.
I’m here and on this topic, personally, because everything I’ve read on the subject of faith, science, and Genesis has seemed unsatisfactory. All responses appear to play the same sort of game, along the same sort of line, with different factions placing themselves at different points on that one dimension. This includes young earth creationists, old earth creationists, and the folks down in theistic evolution.
Even those who will find themselves somewhere within that dichotomy will usually also find that the answers given previously by another thinker do not fully satisfy, do not cover all the important bases. This is especially true amongst the more gnostic evangelicals. As such, everybody has their giants, everybody has their own vote for who the heavyweights are.
Admittedly, I’d only ever heard of two of the people you’d mentioned (McGrath and Enns), and only read one of them: Enns’ “Inspiration and Incarnation”, which I found to be a rather dreadful read, conservative and largely unimaginative, though albeit well-intentioned.
As for “open source” and how it regards referencing “anything anyone else has ever said”:
“The idea that an idea can be stolen from you is meaningless. If it can be stolen from you, that is because it is unimportant. If it can be stolen from you, the fact is that it is not yours.”
—Jean Baudrillard
http://www.danielbooy.co.nr/
The suPer-EsSential Divine Gloom (cc)
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
dbecke,
The whole thing of science and faith is a very interesting discussion in itself and though a lot of heavy hitters have weighed in, I’d agree with Danielbooy that so far none of the proposed syntheses are convincing. Problems exist on many fronts beginning with our epistemologies, and including our hermeneutics as well as our understanding of science as the arbiter of the physical universe. Nonetheless, though it is a diffiult area, it is one that is worth struggling with.
Since you find it so interesting, and are ‘up’ on the latest contributions, I would suggest that you put up a post on this fascinating subject. You might also find some other posts here at OST that have discussed the science - faith questions to be of interest, and your wisdom on Genesis 1 (another great John Doyle post) would also be appreciated.
In the meantime I will attempt to resist the temptation to strike out on a tangent to John Doyle’s present (and fascinating) explorations on the slippery slides into the noman’s lands of agostic-atheistic-fundamentalist biblical discourse.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
Interesting. I really loved Enns’ book. But you are right, I think, that there is no satisfying “synthesis.” I wonder, though, if it is unrealistic to expect such a synthesis?
I’d suggest that framing this discussion in terms of “acting as though the text were not inerrant” is a mistake. Immediately, that drives us into competing categories of “truth” and “error,” and we’re forced to put the text into one of those boxes.
Maybe a better question is, “what literary genre is this text?” If the text is not intended to be a simple factual narrative genre, then it is not in “error” if it omits some details or recasts some events using symbolic language or figures.
Within the text itself, there are some good reasons to ask questions about genre. For example, the sun appears well after the first “day”; the days seem to have a parallel structure (see Henri Blocher’s commentary on this “framework” approach); then there is the garden with teh magical trees and talking snake. The text also bears similarities to, but also important differences with, earlier Mesopotamian creation myths, suggesting that it has a polemical purpose rather than merely being reportage. And other parts of the text that we don’t often focus on assume a typical ancient near eastern cosmology in which the earth is the center of the universe and the sky is a solid tent supported by pillars (See John Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament).
OTOH, starting with Gen. 2, notwithstanding the mystical elements, the text seems to take on something of a more concrete form, suggesting that it is not entirely fictional or allegorical. It seems to me, then, to be a mixed genre that might not even be entirely familiar to us today.
A very interesting study on the genre of these narratives is an older book, Conrad Hyers, The Meaning of Creation. I’m not sure I agree with Hyers because he views these narratives as essentially non-historical. However, Hyers illustrates very well how the text is primarily a polemic against the Babylonian creation myths.
One of the reasons, then, that there is no satisfying “synthesis” of these texts and modern science is that the texts serve entirely different purposes than those that interest modern science. They are not simple “scientific” or even simple “historical” documents. I maintain that they are historical narratives of a sort, but the genre is a very unique and one that selectively reports certain information for polemical purposes within an ancient near eastern cosmological and mythic framework. This isn’t “error” — it’s exactly what the text is meant to do.
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
"I’d suggest that framing this discussion in terms of “acting as though
the text were not inerrant” is a mistake."
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. I agree that there are many ways to construe the Biblical creation narratives as true or meaningful or inspirational without asserting their historical accuracy. (One could, of course, extend the same courtesy to other non-canonical ancient myths, extracting their symbolic meaning and regarding them as God-inspired texts.) I’m proposing that, whatever these texts are, factual historical records of how the universe and humankind came into being is something they probably are not. So, if we set aside the historicity of the events these narratives describe, regarding them as neither true nor false but nonexistent, to what extent is the rest of the Bible affected by this act of excision? I.e., to what extent do other Biblical writings depend on their interpreting Genesis 1-3 as literally and historically true? If not at all, then the reader can make figurative or spiritual sense of the creation stories without losing anything substantial. But if, say, a particular passage in a Pauline letter seems to make sense only if we infer that he read Genesis 1-3 not as "true myth" but as a historically accurate account, then the hermeneutical task gets more complicated.
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
John said: But if, say, a particular passage in a Pauline letter seems to make sense only if we infer that he read Genesis 1-3 not as “true myth” but as a historically accurate account, then the hermeneutical task gets more complicated.
Right. Which is one reason why I don’t think “true myth” or “broken myth” or “allegory” are appropriate categories for Gen. 1-3. But the alternative is not necessarily “simple history” which is either “true” or “in error” in some binary fashion.
Take the example of Adam, to whom Paul refers several times to make important theological points. Could Adam be both a historical person and a literary / typological representative of humanity? If so, perhaps we don’t need to worry too much about where Adam fits in human evolutionary history (assuming the scientific account of evolutionary history is correct). Perhaps Gen. 1-3 doesn’t give us a blow-by-blow account of human and cosmic origins — perhaps it’s a very selective set of historical guideposts within the framework of a symbolic-mythic setting.
John said: One could, of course, extend the same courtesy to other non-canonical ancient myths, extracting their symbolic meaning and regarding them as God-inspired texts.
I’d disagree with you here, because one thing the Biblical creation narratives do seem to be clearly is a polemic against the Babylonian creation myths. They shout “the LORD alone made the world and made you; creation and humanity is not the byproduct of a war between the Marduk and Tiamat.” (Here is a link to the Enuma Elish, BTW: http://www.cresourcei.org/enumaelish.html_
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
"Take the example of Adam, to whom Paul refers several times to make important theological points. Could Adam be both a historical person and a literary / typological representative of humanity?
We’ve already looked at all but one (I think) of those Pauline references in this thread, in case you’re interested in participating more directly in the discussion of any of them. We haven’t gotten to I Cor. 15 yet, which should be interesting.
"They shout “the LORD alone made the world and made you"
How do you know that that’s what they’re shouting? By what hermeneutical principle do you discern this true meaning?
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
Enns’ book and I have some difficulties together. Perhaps it was the circumstances surrounding my reading it: an evangelical friend of mine sent it to me as a way to “bridge discussion” between he and I; Enns, however, didn’t represent “my side” in any meaningful way. It was as though he set up a ‘liberal’ straw-man – many evangelicals, it seems, still think in terms of twos when it comes to the types of Christian one can be – and began to dialogue with it. I could see that Enns was communicating, but I wasn’t sure with whom.
In any event, I agree with you; it is entirely unrealistic to expect a synthesis between science and the text. This is why most of the projects heretofore have seemed, to me, to be dissatisfying: the attempt to reconcile two great Truth-sets with one another (as all truth is God’s Truth). At the same time, I’m not sure that I would want to travel the route you propose, perhaps for a similar reason; the text is myth, the text is history, the text is allegory: and then the text is static, lifeless, and beyond utilization. The danger of literary criticism is the degree to which it is still taken seriously; many of us still believe that these literary categories exist outside of literature itself, that these categories represent what a text actually is, that many still fail to recognize that literary criticism is something we have imposed upon the text, and not something that the text can reveal to us.
All the while, categorization by means of genre is still playing the game of truth/error; within the genres themselves exist means by which literature can be judged. Within Christian thought (cf. back to Enns’ book), this easily leads to how the texts ought to be read, what lessons the texts have for us – given their genre – and by consequence, how God and the ancients are instructing us still to this day.
Then the gospels and Paul become effective voices against empire. Then the Song of Solomon becomes a Biblical guide to holy lovemaking. Then the minor prophets have something to say about Sudan, and people become capable of asking “What would Jesus drive?” while maintaining a straight face. Then: people are led to believe that the Biblical authors were speaking to us, to all of time, and might be able to give us advice regarding fast food, or what sort of music we should listen to. Why must the text be something at all? What if the text were nothing, and all of these formulations were little more than reflections of ourselves within believable constraints?
Having said all that, a bit of stability can be a very good thing, and literary criticism certainly provides this. What it doesn’t seem to provide, at least in my experience, is a way out, and the pneumatic forces behind and underneath text and interpretation need a way out. Genesis as myth, Genesis as foundation-of-kingdom, Genesis as undermining-of-empire, Genesis as bedtime story, Genesis as morality lesson: and so on. I only desire the ability to keep the avenues open, should the spirit of interpretation feel the need to explore.
http://www.danielbooy.co.nr/
The suPer-EsSential Divine Gloom (cc)
one flesh
Just to cover all the bases (yet another baseball idiom), twice more Paul cites "the two will become one flesh" from Gen. 2:24. In both I Cor. 6:16 and Eph. 5:31 the immediate context is sexual immorality, but Paul uses the phrase in reference to the believer’s being joined with Christ. The NT idea of mystical union with Christ doesn’t really hinge on this analogy from the creation, so unless someone else has something to say about these two Pauline passages we’ll move on.
son of Adam, son of God
Two of the gospels include a genealogy of Jesus. What concerns us here isn’t the task of reconciling the details of these two family trees, but rather their starting and ending points. Matthew starts the lineage with Abraham and, through a series of "begats," moves forward generation by generation until he gets to Jesus. Luke reverses the order, beginning with Jesus and moving backward through a series of "sons of." But Luke doesn’t stop at Abraham — he keeps going back. In Luke 3:38 the genealogical sequence reaches its beginning:
1 Chronicles begins its genealogy with Adam, so Luke is embedding the story of Jesus within the OT historical narrative in its longest version. Are we to assume, then, that the writers of these two genealogies believed that Adam was the first man, created by God from the dust, in relatively recent times? According to the Jewish calendar we’re living in the year 5768, arrived at by counting the years forward from the Adam creation story, through the generations, to the present. For those of us who regard Darwinian theory as a generally accurate account of human evolution, this dating scheme is preposterous, as is the tracing of individual genealogies back to the first biologically human being.
On the "Common Era" calendar this is the year 2007, counting forward from the birth of Jesus. Clearly Jesus wasn’t the first human being; rather, his life marks the beginning of a new covenant between God and humankind. Could the Biblical genealogies that begin with Adam similarly be tracing the origins of a covenant between God and man? A precedent can be found in what Yahweh says to one of the OT prophets regarding His relationship with His people:
So maybe Adam should be regarded as the man who stands at the beginning of a particular covenantal arrangement with Yahweh, just as Abraham stands in that position in Matthew’s genealogy and as Jesus so stands in Christian reckoning. However, Luke traces the genealogy of Jesus one step beyond the writer of 1 Chronicles, from Adam to God. Doesn’t this nearly force us to assume that Luke regarded Adam as the first human being?
It’s the "son of" formula that gives us pause. In neither version of the creation of man recorded in Genesis do we see God giving birth to His creation or to the first humans. Unlike many other ancient gods, the God (or gods) of Genesis 1-3 doesn’t bring the heavens and earth forth from himself, such that the universe shares whatever essence or genetic matter He himself possesses. Nor is the universe described as an emanation or materialization of God, as in pantheistic and panentheistic religions. Rather, the creation is something other than God, something that he creates rather than something that was once or that remains part of Himself. So why does Luke say that Adam is "the son of God"?
In John’s gospel the Jews are about to stone Jesus:
Here Jesus is citing Psalm 82:6:
Jesus goes on to say that the psalmist called them gods, to whom the word of God came (John 10:35). Maybe, then, when Luke refers to Adam as "the son of God," he’s referring not to biological lineage but to the relationship God established with Adam, the covenant He created between them. Regardless of how Adam came into existence as a biological entity, he was someone "to whom the word of God came." It’s a father-son relationship that persisted from Adam through succeeding generations all the way to Jesus.
death and immortality
Here Paul refers to the Fall narrative of Genesis 2-3 and God’s warning to Adam:
From an evolutionary perspective the idea that death entered the world through human disobedience makes no sense. Death plays an important role in evolutionary theory: organisms carrying a gene that offers adaptive advantages survive and reproduce; organisms that lack the adaptive gene die off. The human genome evolved over countless generations of mutations and life-and-death cycles. One could say that, if it wasn’t for the presence of death in the world, the first man would never have come into being.
In the True Myth post we tried to interpret God’s warning to Adam and its fulfillment. Adam ate, but he didn’t die in that day. He and Eve were expelled from the Garden, but according to Gen. 5:3-5 he lived hundreds of years after that. Adam probably wasn’t created immortal, since in Gen. 2:7 God made him from the dust of the ground. Through disobedience Adam was expelled from Yahweh’s Garden and returned to the world at large. He was barred access to the Tree of Life, through which his immortality and that of his progeny would have been assured. In the day he ate the forbidden fruit Adam’s death became inevitable, along with the death of all subsequent human generations. That, at least, was our best literal understanding of the Genesis text.
Suppose we acknowledge that man is naturally a mortal being like any other evolved earthly species. Only through divine intervention can man attain immortality. According to Paul, Christ delivers immortality to man not by preventing his death but by resurrecting him from the dead. From the perspective of modern science such an eventually is a natural impossibility. But Paul presents the resurrection as a supernatural event, with immortality bestowed upon man as a miraculous supplement to nature.
The idea of supplemental immortality is consistent with the rest of 1 Cor. 15. Paul says that human flesh is different from the flesh of other kinds of beasts (v. 39), but at the same time all earthly bodies should be distinguished from heavenly bodies (v. 40). The human earthly body is like a seed from which the imperishable spiritual body "sprouts" in the resurrection (v. 42-44). Christ’s resurrection sets the precedent:
Here Paul cites Genesis 2:7, where God breathed life into Adam. We noted in the True Myth thread that "living soul" isn’t a term restricted to human life. When God assigns Adam the task of naming all the creature, the writer refers to the creatures as "living souls" (Gen. 2:19). Paul is emphasizing not man’s uniqueness as the only creature with both a body and a soul, but rather his mortal, fleshly similarity to all other beasts.
Paul makes no reference to the Fall or to God’s curse of death; rather, he says that man’s current mortal situation is "natural," the way he was created, like any other earthy creature. To this earthy mortal nature a spiritual immortal "supernature" will be added as a supplement, enveloping the dead body in new life:
Paul continues his reverie, following his citation from Isaiah with one from Hosea:
Paul pointedly doesn’t say what we might have expected him to say; namely, that the sting of sin is death, which would imply that human mortality is a consequence of Adam’s sin. Instead he says that the sting of death is sin, gesturing toward a broader theory of sin and salvation that he elaborates elsewhere and that goes beyond the scope of our current investigations. It’s worth noting, however, that in this context of human mortality Paul asserts that the power of sin doesn’t devolve from a depraved human nature inherited from Adam; instead it comes from the (God-given) law.
Those of us with a sci-tech bent can’t help but wonder how the resurrection might "work." After death the human body returns to the dust from which it was made (Gen. 3:19), so resurrection can’t be a "simple" matter of reanimating lifeless but intact flesh. There would need to be a complete reassembly of the body. And what about the individual human self, which in our experience is inseparable from our biology? Certainly reassembling the individual’s unique DNA string would also recreate that person’s unique neurochemistry. However, if the resurrection was achieved through a high-precision DNA sequencer and advanced cloning technology, the specific historical life of the person — the experiences, the memories, the relationships, what he or she became through living a real human life — would be gone. Somehow the traces of the life itself, the specific neural pathways that had been etched in the brain over the course of a uniquely lived life, would have to be stored in some non-biological form until the resurrection. Science fiction has generated thought experiments along these lines, and perhaps over time scientists might be able to reproduce such a perfect neural replica of an individual mind that this sort of "personality resurrection" could eventually become feasible. Maybe God already has access to this highly advanced neural network simulation technology.
Still, there remains the supernatural supplement, the immortal spiritual body in which the resurrected body is enveloped. Without more information regarding the characteristics of this spiritual body it’s difficult to speculate much further (LOL).
Re: death and immortality
To summarize from the preceding 1 Cor. 15 discussion: Paul asserts that it’s natural for the human body to die. In Gen. 3 Adam, because of his disobedience, is expelled from the Garden and so denied access to the Tree of Life which would have bestowed immortality on him. As a result man’s natural mortal body was not supplemented by and enfolded in this God-given immortality. Romans 5 is consistent with that reading. "Death entered the world" means that man, expelled from the Garden because of sin, takes his natural mortality with him back into the world. The context of this passage deals with justification by faith and reconciliation with God through Christ. It seems unlikely, then, that Paul would here be proposing the theory, improbable I suspect even two thousand years ago, that because Adam sinned death in general entered the world; i.e., that no creatures ever died before this first human sin was committed. It’s conceivable that, in the second half of this verse, Paul is saying that each individual human repeats Adam’s tragic sequence, through sin forfeiting access to the immortal supplement which would otherwise have been granted. In whatever way this perplexing phrase should be interpreted, it again emphasizes that the "death" Paul has in mind here is specifically human death.
Re: death and immortality
For the sake of continuity, I’ll note here that I put up a related comment at Andrew’s commentary on Romans 5, supporting the ideas already elaborated here: (1) When Paul says that death entered the world through Adam, he’s referring to death passing through to human beings in particular, not to nature in general. (2) In Paul and in Genesis mortality is the natural human condition rather than a corruption caused by Adam’s sin.
Re: death and immortality
I’d agree that this is the Pauline argument. I think there is also a strong affinity here with the Johanine idea of abundant life. That is, life here and now, rather then in some future reformatted life. It’s here that the Johanine idea of indwelling Christ and the Pauline conception of ‘being in’ Christ arwe existential, here and now, and challenge us to look at what discipleship means for the present.
Life is to be fully lived and life is filled to fullness and to overflowing, if it is lived in the NOW of Jesus.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: death and immortality
"life here and now, rather then in some future reformatted life."
Right. As Paul says in 1 Cor. 15:40-41:
Re: death and immortality
I agree. It is as N.T. Wright says, the age to come has broken into the present, while remaining also future. Our present life should be a foreshadow of our future life. We have life in Christ now, but await the redemption of our bodies.
original sin?
It’s not necessary to assert that Adam was the very first human being on earth for Paul’s extended comparison between Adam and Jesus in Romans 5 to make sense. As I mentioned with respect to the genealogy in Luke 3, Adam could be the first "son of God" in the sense that he was the first man to whom Yahweh made himself known.
However, if there were other men, even other nations, to whom Yahweh did not make himself known, then what happens to the idea of original sin, whereby through Adam’s sin all human beings somehow inherit a corruption of their nature, whereby they are born with either a tendency to sin or an intrinsically sinful nature? If Adam’s sinfulness passes through to only one nation or group of nations, doesn’t that constitute a kind of racism on the part of Yahweh?
We can almost work our way out of this conundrum First, we should observe that 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 Cor. 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 OT 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, this passage in Romans 5 is the only NT text to suggest the idea that Adam’s original sin caused the sinfulness of his descendants. So if we can talk ourselves into an alternative reading here, we might be able to get rid of the doctrine altogether.
So how would we interpret Romans 5:12-21 as if Adam was not the first genetically human on earth but rather the first man to whom God made his presence known? All the references to the many dying through Adam’s sin we’ve already accounted for. But what about this: the judgment arose from one transgression resulting in condemnation (v. 16) — the implication is that through Adam’s transgression all his descendants too were condemned. If we interpret this as meaning they were condemned to death we’re still okay. This interpretation fits with the continuation of Paul’s thought in the next verse: For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one…(v. 17). In other words, the one transgression led to the descendants being condemned to mortality.
But now we get to the one verse that’s hard to avoid:
That sure sounds like original sin to me. If anybody has an interpretation of verse 19 that doesn’t turn into original sin, I hope you’ll run it by us even if you haven’t worked all the bugs out yet. Otherwise, to be continued…
original sin (continued)
Is there a straight reading Romans 5:19 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 —
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
the creation's corruption in Romans 8
This thought experiment seems less like an exhilerating ride down a slippery slope and more like a lonely trudge up a hill. We slog on toward the bottom (or the top):
We could disregard the Genesis creation narratives and this passage would still make sense. However, Paul indirectly alludes to Genesis 3, so it must be considered. First, the "corruption" of the creation — is it an unnatural condition resulting from God’s cursing the ground in Gen. 3:17-19, causing thorns and thistles to grow, making it difficult for Adam to scratch out a living? From a Darwinian perspective it’s preposterous to suppose that no weeds grew on the earth until after man first sinned.
In what other way might the creation be subject to the "slavery of corruption", other than through some sort of deterioration of nature itself? Does the text support the interpretation that man rather than God caused the corruption? I think so. Leading up to this passage Paul addresses the twofold fragility of the human condition: the immorality of the flesh and the morality of the body. The flesh, as we discussed in Romans 5, isn’t a biological transformation of human nature passed down biologically through successive generations, but rather an misalignment between human nature and law from which the desire to violate law emerges. The flesh dies with Christ on the cross, through which those who are justified also die to the Law. The natural physical body, on the other hand, is buried like a seed that sprouts forth in the glorified spiritual body of the resurrection.
Analogously, Paul speaks of both the corruption and the futility of the creation. The former is associated with immorality, the latter with mortality. Perhaps the interaction of man with nature is intrinsically corrupting. Plants don’t become weeds until they get in the way of human farmers. The natural plant isn’t corrupted in its nature, but in its relationship with man. And of course man does corrupt nature even without evil intent, as a byproduct of being fruitful and multiplying and subduing the earth. In the eschaton, the corruption of nature that spontaneously results from the distinctly and naturally human way of living will come to an end, and the natural "mortality" of nature will be overcome when the present creation "gives birth" to a new creation. It’s a painful delivery, sort of like the dying of the mortal human body, but Paul says it will be glorious.
Re: the creation's corruption in Romans 8
It’s so interesting that while the cursing in Genesis seems to link Adam’s sin to Adam’s subsequently having to strive with nature in order to eke out a survival, here in Romans 8 Paul meditates on nature’s struggle being like that of the woman in childbirth. Perhaps he found the imagery of delivery to be much closer to how he sees nature’s travails. The ‘revealing of the sons’ will be a tremendous delivery indeed and the accompanying joy too of similarly ‘orders of magnitude’ greater.
I also like the idea of a bad misfit with nature resulting from a sort of a death of understanding, a sudden lack of cooperation. Mankind finds it easier to coopt nature rather than to cooperate with it.
Is it possible that the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was just this, a sort of Pandora’s box of cooptation?
The inability to obey God’s law is in some sense not just a result of inheritance but there is also a sense in Romans that each human individual has personally participated in Adam’s rebellion.
Live to serve : Serve to live
the curse on childbearing
"Paul meditates on nature’s struggle being like that of the woman in
childbirth. Perhaps he found the imagery of delivery to be much closer
to how he sees nature’s travails."
With this imagery Paul again alludes to the Fall:
As you know, Sam, I recently speculated about this curse on my blog. "What would happen if we substituted an evolutionary narrative for the
Biblical story? The pain of childbirth is due mostly to the size of the
baby’s head relative to the width of the woman’s pelvis. The human head
is big because it’s got such a big brain inside the skull. Presumably
the advantages of the big head outweighed the mother’s discomfort and
the significant risk of death posed to both mother and infant during
childbirth. Maybe we can interpret the Genesis story as saying that an
adverse consequence of humans having a big brain is our natural
curiosity about understanding good and evil, which invariably causes us
problems."
You disagreed: "If my childhood memories are accurate of African village life, giving
birth seemed to be no big deal. The village ‘aunties’ would be in
attendance but it seemed to be fast and not at all unusual to see the
lady out working the fields in a couple days with her newborn strapped
to her back." If that’s the case, then the curse of childbirth placed on Eve could have been cultural rather than physiological. What is it about the Judeo-Christian ethos that would result in a psychosomatic hysterical (hystera = womb in Greek) pain associated with giving birth? Might we invoke a Freudian interpretation, that the pain of childbirth constitutes a kind of deflection of forbidden sexual desire that cannot be expressed directly? Here’s the rest of Genesis 3:16:
The text does seem to link the woman’s pain in childbirth to sexual desire, not directly — because you desire you will experience pain — but indirectly — you will experience pain and yet you will desire. The phrase doesn’t say "you shall desire your husband," with "you" as subject; instead it makes "desire" the subject, as if the woman were being carried along by an impersonal force that works through her, maybe even in spite of her. My mastery of Hebrew prepositions isn’t strong enough to go farther, but I’m curious about "desire for your husband." There’s an ambivalence built into the word "for" this phrase: your desire is directed toward your husband, and your desire is for your husband’s benefit. The latter idea suggests itself in the concusion of the verse — "and he shall rule over you." In effect your husband’s desire shall rule your desire, you shall desire the desire of your husband. Here’s the Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink:
This idea of the "hysterical" woman being what the "obsessive" man desires is consistent with the Genesis 2 creation story, where woman is created by taking something out of man, thereby stimulating man’s subsequent desire to pursue woman, to rejoin her to himself in order to restore what’s missing.
We’re way off topic now — this discussion maybe belongs in the True Myth post, or some other nonexistent post exploring alternative interpretations of Genesis 2-3. I’ll pick up the topic of the creation itself giving birth in a separate comment.
birth of new creation
"here in Romans 8
Paul meditates on nature’s struggle being like that of the woman in
childbirth. Perhaps he found the imagery of delivery to be much closer
to how he sees nature’s travails."
In 1 Cor. 15 Paul says that there is the natural body and the spiritual body. Even though a redeemed person dies to the flesh and is renewed in spirit, that person’s natural body still dies and returns to the dust from whence it came. Paul describes the natural human body as analogous to a seed that must be buried in the ground so that a new plant can grow. The spiritual body isn’t just a renewal of the physical body: it is to the physical body as a new plant is to a seed from which it grows.
When in Romans 8 Paul says that the creation "suffers the pains of childbirth," is he saying saying that, as the natural body gives birth to the spiritual body, so to the natural creation will give birth to a supernatural creation? The existing natural creation can be renewed from its corruption, but that’s not the same as a new creation emerging from the old as a baby emerges from its mother’s womb. While there is continuity between mother and child, there is also radical difference.
But it’s not clear that the birth Paul has in mind here is a whole new creation. It seems rather that the natural creation is going to give birth to the sons of God (v. 19). When the sons of God are revealed in their freedom and glory, the creation will be relieved of its futility and slavery to corruption (v. 20-21). Natural man works to gain sustenance from the earth (Gen. 3:17). Because the earth resists man’s work, the earth is always already corrupt from man’s perspective. And man’s work further corrupts the earth through destruction of resources and so on. If the spiritual man no longer needs to work to sustain himself, then this twofold corruption resulting from man’s interaction with nature would come to an end.
There’s a kind of Moebius strip-like process envisioned here. The sons of God in Christ can renew nature just as they can renew their physical bodies. But this renewal is also a preparation of the creation, enabling it to give birth to the sons of God in their full spiritual glory, who will no longer experience the creation as corrupt or contribute to its deterioration.
without excuse in Romans 1
If human nature was corrupted by original sin, then the human ability to discern God’s hand in the creation might be compromised. If the creation too has become corrupted as a result of man’s sin, then nature itself presents a distorted reflection of what God is like. Christianity has historically posited both forms of corruption, based on Paul’s allusions to the Fall of Genesis 3. We’ve just looked at both these purported corruptions: of human nature in Romans 5, and of the creation in Romans 8. By assuming the truth of evolution we forced ourselves to imagine other ways of interpreting Paul’s words that didn’t force the reader to embrace scientifically implausible beliefs. I personally think these alternative explanations make sense scientifically without distorting the literal meaning of the book of Romans or violating the essence of Christian theology.
We can put the two revised interpretations of corruption together in Romans 1. Man’s nature isn’t corrupted: there’s an incompatibility between man and law from which corruption inevitably emerges. Nature itself isn’t corrupted: there’s an incompatibility between man and nature from which corruption inevitably emerges. If we as natural human beings can manage to see beyond the uses to which we put nature in order to regard it for what it is in itself, Paul says that we should be able to learn something about God.
If, in keeping with the trajectory established in this thread, we presume that the heavens and earth came into being roughly the way contemporary science says it did, what can be inferred about "His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature"? That He is a God not of conscious design and planned production and dramatically supernatural spectacles but of spontaneous mutation and chance, of incremental evolution and natural selection? That whatever emerges from such processes God regards as "good"? Are we "without excuse" if we don’t see this sort of God revealed through the creation?
Re: without excuse in Romans 1
Well, if Paul had meant to generalise just so then we too would be justified in believing that God is just the entropic force embodied and pomotified by our overly hypothetical minds. But, I contend in a thread elsewhere that this juicy passage may not be Paul’s at all, or not in that sense anyway. In which case, the cosmology of Roman’s 5-8 would be much closer to Paul’s thinking.
Mankind’s organic connection with the nature that birthed her has been disturbed rather nastilly by the fall. At the same time, the easy cameraderie and the active cooperation between God and man has also been replaced by a befuddlement in which though it should be plain to us that God has created and actively sustains his creation yet we have only enough intelligence left to discern our own genius.
What Paul does not speculate much on until Romans 7, and there only briefly, is that our myopic selfconsciousness now means that we have a hard time integrating even our own little selves so that it is a losing struggle to get ourselves to even sustain the thought that we need to get back to being at one with God again.
Live to serve : Serve to live
sabbath rest in Hebrews 4
The writer of Hebrews says that the Jews wandered forty years before they entered into Israel because of their unbelief (3:19). We’re reminded of Moses, laying down the Law in the wilderness of Sinai, thinking ahead to the time when at last the wanderers will cross the Jordan into the land of promise:
Hebrews 4 begins with a promise embedded in a warning: don’t fall short like the Sinai wanderers, because a promised entry into God’s rest remains open to you. This promise is like the Sinai promise of old, but it harkens even farther back than that:
"Somewhere" is, of course, Genesis 2:2. Why go back so far? Because it wasn’t just a rest promised by God: it was the rest of God. God did the work of creation during a delineated temporal interval, at the end of which his work was finished and he rested. In a Darwinian world the creation is never finished: evolutionary processes of mutation and natural selection continue unabated. Would an evolutionary perspective render meaningless the reference to God’s rest in Hebrews 4?
I don’t believe so. The writer isn’t talking so much about the specific seventh day, but rather the idea of God’s rest. God rests in the Creation narratives, but he also rests in David’s time. Twice the writer of Hebrews cites the warning of Psalm 95:
This rest of God isn’t in the past, on the seventh day of Creation; it’s in the future. The promise, on the other hand, is for today. There was a "today" in the Creation and a "today" when the Psalmist wrote; now, says the writer of Hebrews, another "today" is opened. And the rest of God didn’t happen only on the seventh day of the Creation, or even when Joshua led the Jews into Israel.
Did this Sabbath rest come to pass sometime shortly after the book of Hebrews was written, or is still to come? Was the "today" a time-limited opportunity, or is it always "today"? These are questions worth pursuing, but within the limited scope of our project we can reliably assert that the author of Hebrews’ idea of the "Sabbath rest" doesn’t depend on the historicity of the Genesis 1 creation narrative.
* * *
To my knowledge, we have now looked at all the New Testament passages that allude specifically to Genesis 1-3. That means we can now "rest" from this extended series of exegetical exercises. Once I recover from the exhilerating (or tedious) ride down the slippery slope, I may be able to make a few final observations.
Re: sabbath rest in Hebrews 4
Just as a random thought, what view do you think the emerging church should take on the Sabbath? Would a narrative-driven theology incline us to rest on the seventh day?
Re: sabbath rest in Hebrews 4
Surely there are others better equipped to voice an opinion, enarchay. From a theological perspective there’s no obligation, I wouldn’t think, inasmuch as even Jewish Christians are released from the Law. From the gospel narrative we get this:
I’d say that if God exists He is probably still working, wouldn’t you? That would defer the "sabbath rest" of Hebrews 4 to the eschaton. That said, I’d certainly think the church would be free to set aside a sabbath rest, whether weekly or otherwise.
The bottom of the slide
"Once I recover from the exhilerating (or tedious) ride down the slippery slope, I may be able to make a few final observations."
Inasmuch as I seem to be the only one who found much pleasure in this ride down the slippery slope of a Christianity devoid of Genesis 1-3, I won’t make any summary comments about the series of miniposts I’ve written on this thread. Some speculation might be in order as to why this thread didn’t generate much discussion. Maybe OST is more oriented to systematic theology than to the kind of verse-specific exposition I’ve undertaken here. Also, I’ve approached the Scriptures from outside the Christian fold, seeing if the text might be opened up, allowing easier access to readers for whom certain passages prove particularly off-putting. This approach might not be particularly useful to Christians, who are more prepared to accommodate the troublesome bits even if they’re not sure how best to accomplish the necessary reconciliations.
Anyhow, thanks for your attention even if this wasn’t really your cup of tea. I wish we’d had more discussion, but we don’t always get what we wish for.
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
The Scriptural cosmogonies might be regarded as thought experiments,
speculations about how the present reality might have emerged out of
some hypothetical past reality…what is most likely the case; namely, that Genesis 1-3
are myths in the usual sense of the term: works of individual or
collective imagination, speculative attempts to explain mysteries in
the absence of adequate information.
If one is to regard the oldest myths as being the survivors of thought competitions and cultural evolutions over startlingly long periods of time, one has to then ask why these particular myths have proved so resilient and so worthwhile to human beings even though the extgernal trappings of the human lives thatbirthed them are no longer discernible.
In the "Genesis 1 as true Myth" post I recall that a number of the contributors were startled that we could now make out little as far as the original ‘framing’ context of the stories. It is not only that there are few textual hints, but also that the story seems to reach us on a deeper and more essential level where the elements are felt to be common and easy to identify oneself with rather than being the products of a hoary past with which we now can have no conceivable connection. Good stories always seem to be able to rise above and beyond their immediate contexts and to be able to communicate ‘truth’ across generations.
A part of this could be due to the human ability to ‘suspend disbelief’ but is that all that it is?
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
This is a very interesting discussion that is fitting with the title, “the creation as thought experiments.” I believe it is always good to express your comments in a way that there will be healthy push backs on your ideas. I never think it is good for a person to become to one minded and only have one point of view.
In this particular topic, I sense that they issue is of one: is the Bible in error in the creation account. Should we take it literal or not? And not to say that these argument aren’t relevant and important because it is but I’m not hundred percent sure how the questions arised will totally affect my relationship with Jesus Christ. My only fear is that once I start not trusting or believing in what the Bible has to say, then I’m afraid that when I pray to Him, He isn’t going to be entirely listening.
I believe that the Spirit of God is the one whom we should be directing our thoughts and concerns to. In this particular exercise of the creation in the Bible, we should be aware that God speaks to us in many different ways.
Vanhoozer points out that, since Scripture utilizes a variety of “genre” in communicating its message (i.e., narratives, propositions, poetry, prophecy, etc.), it has a “multi-faceted” authority that only demonstrates the complexity of the Spirit’s authority in speaking forth His “truth” (Vanhoozer, “The Semantics of Biblical Literature,” 92). Vanhoozer I believe looks towards the Timothy passage that all Scripture is inspired by God and that God is Truth therefore all of Scripture is Truth.