The Easiest Example

The 11th chapter of Matthew is an unyielding progression of Jesus' expectations of us.  It is a vigorous progression from the faith that we expect down to the faith that Jesus expects.

This progression is framed initially as Jesus' response to the query from John's disciples: "Go and shew John again those things. . . ."  Jesus' response ends with an admonition: "And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me" (Matthew 11:2-6, KJV).

This admonition is a fitting preface for the discourse that is to follow, because it sums up the substance of that discourse.  Jesus is going to tell his followers that his greatest of expectation of them is in the negative: they must get rid of the unnecessary in order to get at what matters.  We are not to be offended in that Jesus wants to be exactly what he intends to be to us, and we are largely to understand those intentions in the framework of out own shattered expectations.

True religion is not going to be what we expect it to be: "What went ye out into the wilderness to see?" (11:7).  Jesus tells us that John was a prophet, a messenger, a faint foreshadowing of the true believer, a remnant of religion typified by ambition and striving, and a fulfillment of the promise of Elijah's return--a return that Jesus describes in deflating terms, scarcely reflecting the anticipations of the book of Malachi.  As Jesus says,

"Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things.  But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed" (17:11-12).

Jesus disassembles John the Baptist, and then proceeds to disassemble religion.  All of the things that hold religion together in our preconceptions are to be torn away:

"But whereunto shall I liken this generation? It is like unto children sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fellows, And saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented.  For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil.  The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber. . . ." (11:16-19).  Religion has always be burdened with--always untenable--notions that one's righteousness is seen in distinction to the un-righteousness of one's "fellows."

And religion has always been burdened with notions that (especially coupled with a false and convenient humility) getting right with God involves something more than a determination to get right with God.  Jesus tears into the idea that repentance has some sort of secondary or dependent relationship to true religion:

"Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes" (11:21).

Jesus continues prying away all the elements by which religion might be identified:

"I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes" (11:25).  The wordless lunging toward the meek and wholesome, so much a part of original and infantile iterations of "roused, readied, reaped," is what religion is all about.  We don't know why some people are inclined to do God's will, or inclined to encourage others to do God's will, or indeed why some people are induced to turn from unrighteous paths to the pursuing of God's will.  Never has religion, in any form, been able to answer those questions, and as far as the philosophy of religion is concerned, it is useless to try to figure the matter out:  Or as Jesus says,

". . .no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him" (11:27).  How, then, can anyone be saved?!  In our sin and despair, are we not left alone and in terror, deprived possibly of some salvation formula by which (according to the denominations) some satisfaction might be made for our lost souls?!

"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light" (11:28-30).

Oh.

The Greatest Failed Example

How then did Jesus explain the anomalous situation of John the Baptist (and, presumably, of others like him)?  And what does it all mean for us?

I have already touched on the idea that John--of whom Jesus said "there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist"--could simply be thought unsaved merely because God ordained it so beforehand.  This really is no different an interpretation than that involved in "dispensations"--the notion that the requirements of salvation differ through great Ages of history.  (I know that I am describing "dispensations" conveniently for myself, and that often the topic is given more nuance, such as--for example--the idea that salvations of Adam's or Noah's or Abraham's or Moses time were mediated by pre-figurations of Christ.  Of course, each of these theories relies itself on a "dispensation"--a divine permission to equate Jesus, perhaps incorrectly, with some Old Testament entity.)

Indeed, the whole idea of predestination is a matter of dispensations--salvation granted or withheld by God's sovereign fiat--though at the same time the whole thrust of the Gospel is the business of people being convinced to embrace the true faith.  Such ideas as predestination are futile; they are presumptions upon the prerogatives of God; they are simply evidences of our tendency to muck about in things that are none of our business.

Our business is the Gospel, and the Gospel is about convincing people.  Back to our point: on what scores was John unconvinced?  I will look to the relevant part of Matthew's gospel, which includes the relevant (and shorter) part of Luke.

Jesus ends his message to John (through  John's emissaries) with "And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me" (Matthew 11:6, KJV).  This is not all that puzzling a stance on Jesus' part; one of the first things Jesus must do is overcome reflexive resistance on his listeners' part.  And this is not merely a question of people having an initial resistance; many can hear, read, and consider the message of Jesus all their lives, without embracing the substance of it.

Jesus turns then to his disciples and tells them what a great man John is, though "notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he" (11:11).  Jesus continues with a description of the kingdom of heaven that comports with what we would expect when people of great stature attempt to gain citizenship in the kingdom through precisely that stature:

"And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force" (11:12).  Jesus then continues with a brief description of John, a description not of his rectitude or his magnitude or his miraculous qualities, but rather a description of how the flawed John--described without really describing him--played into the unfolding of God's plan:

"For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John.  And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come" (11:13-14).  The operative notion here is not John's stature, but rather the stature (or, better, the lack of stature) of Jesus' listeners.  Jesus' description of John cascades from John's greatness down to John as a mere vessel of God's message, and the thrust of Jesus' narrative leads to the inescapable duty on the part of the listener to humble themselves unto receptivity: "And if ye will receive it, this is Elias" followed by "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear" (11:15).

So John, who the gospels say points to Jesus, points to Jesus continually, though this hardly seems an enviable position for John.  John, who through his efforts might well have gained salvation, nonetheless is used most crucially by Jesus to illustrate how futile our accomplishments are, how futile our conceits are, and how important it is for us to hack away our accomplishments and conceits and arrive at the simple substance of faith within us.  We will see in the rest of Jesus' discourse how this is so.

The Greatest Failed Missionary

At the end of the last post, I asked if the daunting responsibilities of followers of Jesus "have to include harrowing questions of doctrinal rectitude, presented to us so often by the denominations as though theological distinctions of dizzying complexity and ramifications are what stand between us and the kingdom of heaven?"

As I said, to try to answer this, we will turn again to the ministry of John.  In Matthew and Luke, John the Baptist sends two of his disciples to ask Jesus, "Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?" (Matthew 11:3, KJV).  Mind you, this was after both gospels make plain that John was acquainted, albeit from afar, with the works of Jesus.  Jesus does not give John's emissaries some new theology to carry back to their master; Jesus responds with a reiteration of those works, as though the mere facts stand for themselves.  John was going to have to make do with that:

"Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.  And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me" (11:4-6).

Miracle upon miracle--and then "the poor have the gospel preached to them"--as though that were as much a miracle.  A more important thing to consider about "the poor have the gospel preached to them" is a point I touched on previously: many of those who heard Jesus, or heard his disciples in his lifetime, had only a few such exposures, or for only a brief time.  In the first century, as we have the grind and misery of the lives of the poor so often described in the gospels, "the poor have the gospel preached to them" did not refer to some urban ministry of twice-a-week sessions.  To say "the poor" in the context of the gospels is, often, to say "the sick," or "the dying;" or "the infirm," or "the condemned."  Often the poor had only the most glancing experience of hearing preaching about the outreach of God to them, such that coming to true faith would be--to the eyes of man--the most improbable of miracles.

In contradistinction to this is Jesus' argument--as jarring as it seems to us--that John the Baptist knew all a mortal could, and did all a mortal could, to attain the kingdom of heaven, yet had presumably not done so:

"Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he" (11:11).

But does Jesus not help us to understand why John might not (yet?) be of the kingdom of heaven?  It could always be said that John might not be saved because he was not preordained for salvation--if one would want to make that assertion in the middle of Jesus talking about the preaching of the Gospel.  Or one might shrink from that, as a person withdraws from something loathsome.

Jesus does help us understand--as we shall see.  But we must remember that he does it in the context of the gospel preached to the poor--not the stable, not the well-off, not the gainfully-employed.  Jesus gives us the explanation of salvation in the context of John the Baptist, a paragon of dedication to the truth, and a paramount example of a person who had innumerable opportunities to carefully consider the teachings of his faith and the ministry of Jesus.

Yet John had not grasped the truth.  In the next post, in light of Jesus' further discussion, we will explore why.

Missionaries to the Extent of It

In the last post, I brought up the question of whether religion is primarily an ethical endeavor, or primarily a search for existential truths.  No topic in the Gospels bears more on this question than the accounts of Jesus sending forth missionaries.  I give the reader credit for being able to visualize certain realities.  On this topic two realities impinge: one, that some of the hearers of Jesus' missionaries would die before Jesus' resurrection; and, two, that some of those hearers would have only this exposure to Jesus' teachings in their lifetimes, due to geography or other limiting factors.

I am careful to mention the inescapable presumptions described above (that some hearers of Jesus' missionaries would hear nothing further of his message) because I wish to head off a certain notion that haunts Gospel scholarship--the idea of "dispensations."  This horrid sort of thought entertains the notion that some of the things taught before Jesus' ministry, or before his resurrection, are superseded by later teachings--typically those teachings of the Epistles.  A moment's sober reflection will discern that such thought is infinitely malleable, leading this or any belief system into a morass of convenient revisions.

So I say that Jesus' missionaries were true missionaries, preaching the true Gospel, and preaching real salvation--that is, to the extent to which they were ever intended as missionaries at all (as we know the meaning of the word.)  Or perhaps it would be better to notch back our conceits about Jesus' followers on their journeys, and better to consider them to be simply true disciples of a true master, teaching the truths by which all people might live.

It helps in understanding all this to turn first to the ministry of John the Baptist and his followers.  It is usually held that John offered a sort of proto-salvation, a foreshadowing (of questionable effectiveness in itself for soul-saving) of Jesus' real teachings about salvation.  The Gospels themselves--the Synoptics, that is--seem to start this way, such as John's saying in Matthew:

"I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire" (3:11, KJV).  Yet Jesus' pronouncement, delivered shortly after that, is, "Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (4:17).  And when Jesus sends out his apostles (along with the "Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils" (10:8)), he tells them, "as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand" (10:7).  John's "water unto repentance," so often considered ineffectual "works," is replaced merely by Jesus' exhortation to repentance.  Maybe there is something to that "repentance" business after all.

And then there is Mark, which says that "John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. . . .I indeed have baptized you with water: but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost" (1:4-8).  Then comes Jesus, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel" (1:15); and later, "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" (2:17).  Later, the twelve are described on their mission: "And they went out, and preached that men should repent" (6:12).  Again with the repentance.

And in Luke, here is John again: "And he came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. . . .saying unto them all, I indeed baptize you with water; but one mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire" (3:3-16).  Jesus' ministry was more extensive and powerful than John's, but in Luke he does not forsake "repentance for the remission of sins"; "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" (5:32); the twelve were sent "to preach the kingdom of God" (9:2); and upon their return they witnessed Jesus with the people: "and he received them, and spake unto them of the kingdom of God, and healed them that had need of healing" (9:11).

If indeed the core of Jesus' ministry was something other than that people ought to be nice, to do good, and to refrain from doing harm--then most assuredly Jesus entwined that message throughout the Gospels with a subtlety that would shame the serpent of Eden.  And this is the very Jesus who maintains that his message is simple and our burdens are light.

"Light" burdens, of course, must be meant in contradistinction to the niceties and complications of organized religion.  We all know that, in the final analysis, the burdens to which Jesus makes us liable may well be anything but light.  But do those fearsome burdens have to include harrowing questions of doctrinal rectitude, presented to us so often by the denominations as though theological distinctions of dizzying complexity and ramifications are what stand between us and the kingdom of heaven?

To try to answer this, we will turn again in the next post to the ministry of John.

Missionaries for the Futility of It

To continue the thought from the previous post about how Jesus sends out missionaries, I need to consult the Synoptic Gospels.  First, do the texts say that Jesus gives his disciples the power to convince, convict, or convert?  No.

Matthew: "And when he had called unto him his twelve disciples, he gave them power against unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease" (10:1, KJV).

Mark: "And he called unto him the twelve, and began to send them forth two by two; and gave them power over unclean spirits" (6:7).

Luke: "Then he called his twelve disciples together, and gave them power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases" (9:1).

And then there is the subsequent passage in Luke, in which not the twelve but seventy are sent forth.  Here the same type of empowerment as before is mentioned, but it is mentioned after the fact:

"And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name.  And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.  Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.  Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven" (10:17-20).

Where then is all this frantic modern energy about conversion, about "soul-winning"?  We might perhaps set aside the business about unclean spirits and devils--considering how attenuated our connection to such matters has become--if not for the fact that Jesus in Luke exclaims not about converted souls rushing toward heaven, but rather Satan falling down.  It seems a curious thing that Jesus would emphasize the disciples' victory over Satan, when Satan being flung down has long since been ordained, and the flinging down could be accomplished by God with a word, or with just a thought.

Is it not inescapable that the "missions" described in the Synoptic Gospels were exercises for the disciples, and that they were not--or not primarily--outreaches to the lost?  (Such  an analysis can include the notion that it is not exclusivism, but rather a teacher's prerogative, that Jesus displays when he orders his charges to limit their mission "to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.")

Even the part about, "Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven" sounds strange to us; would we not rather expect to be told to rejoice in that the names of the newly converted--particularly those newly converted that might be attributed to our efforts--are now names inscribed beside ours in heaven?

One would almost wonder if Jesus had any interest at all in whether his bands of itinerant preachers converted anyone.  He tells them in Matthew: "And into whatsoever city or town ye shall enter, enquire who in it is worthy; and there abide till ye go thence" (10:11).  Is it not the sick that require the doctor?  Why does Jesus send his missionaries preferentially to those who would need least such ministrations?

Perhaps the answer lies nearby.  In the hour of welcoming back the seventy, Jesus says "All things are delivered to me of my Father: and no man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal him" (Luke 10:22).

The answer seems inescapable.  People do not convert people.  We can exhort each other; we can encourage each other; we can challenge each other; but we cannot convert each other.  What seem to be 
"conversion" events between people are really just "convergence" events between people--sometimes our interests just coincide, and one person credits another with bringing the truth.   What we really end up with, however, are events--long or short, intense or casual--in which we seem to be sharing important insights about existence.  We also--and this can be the most bittersweet part--tend to feel bolstered in our beliefs in that they are shared by others.

When talking about ideas of ultimate truth, however, we as a species have no defensible basis upon which to test such ideas.  We think of existence as having a certain character, and we cast about for stated views of others that seem to shore up our own ideas.  Ultimately, however, we are left with no more substance than the intellectual exercise of wondering whether what we see as a certain color is what another person sees.

All of this, as we shall see, can bear upon the idea of religion as being properly an ethical endeavor, or rather as being properly a search for existential truths.  That is what we must turn to next.

Missionaries for the Sake of It

There is an extremely important matter to be found among some of the topics we have discussed, particularly among the topics of personal agency and of specific religious beliefs.  As regards specific religious beliefs, they come into play when Jesus says that salvation comes from the Jews, or that he was only sent to the Jews, or that his apostles should heed the following guidance when he sends them out:

"Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Matthew 10:5-6, KJV).

And as regards personal agency, there is the question of persons being required to embrace certain religious beliefs in order to be saved.  Of course, the requirement of persons "to embrace certain religious beliefs in order to be saved" might as well be a stand-in for the whole of church history--two thousand years of horror have heaved up over such questions.

I say that these two matters coalesce into one--the extremely important matter to which I first referred-- and they are fused in something Jesus tells the Samaritan woman:

"Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father.  Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews.  But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father seeketh such to worship him" (John 4:21-23).

But what is there that would drive us to such worship?  As regards personal agency, there is the age-old and never-resolved question: How can a person make himself or herself believe in something--at least, without sacrificing integrity.  To say, "I believe some heretical thing--no, wait!--to save my soul I will say I believe something else--no wait!--that statement of mine is by definition a lie!--no, wait! . . . ."  The whole business is ridiculous, and has deserved all the ridicule it has gotten.  Ultimately the question of what we believe goes back into childhood, back beyond any age of responsibility.  And yet, does Jesus really require the adoption of a doctrine or theology?  As he continues to the Samaritan woman:

"God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth" (4:24).

Now we are zeroing in on The Extremely Important Matter, and it bears on the paramount saying of Jesus just quoted--"God is a Spirit."  Needless, to say, we are approaching the daunting realm of consideration of The Unforgivable Sin, that teaching of Jesus that stands in such contrast to his statement that blasphemy can be forgiven.  The divine--such as it can be comprehended--can be understood as God or the Son of God, and inescapably we end up in our quivering thought processes reducing those concepts to poorly-framed or poorly-conceptualized "gods"--fodder for our musings and occasional outbursts and hopefully less occasional blasphemies.  God as a Spirit, on the other hand, folds back on our pre-conceptual embracing of existence; both the religionist and the atheist can decided if the existence of which we may be cognizant is malign.  (Attempting to say that God and everything he made is malign will not cut it; we would still in that moment be crediting that sense of justice that equates to him, though in our emotion we seek to separate justice from our conceptualization of him.)

All of us in our moods can blaspheme God; that fact--though regrettable in itself--does not bear on why we might make such utterances.  If we are angry at God for being unjust (as we see it) we are still crediting the existence of that Justice, abroad and above the universe, that speaks more to the character of God than any conceptualization we might have of him.

In other words, to contradict the evangelicals most distinctly, it is not important to know who Jesus is.  It is not important to know who God is.  It is, however, important to know what God is.

"God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth" (John 4:24).

We have touched on the "spirit" part, but what about the "truth" part?  Earlier I referred to the episode when Jesus sent his apostles "to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."  Correctly viewed, this commission is described by Jesus in an extended passage, so dire in its content that many have--without clear textual warrant--assumed that its latter verses are meant to be about the "End Times."  Jesus says, "And ye shall be brought before governors and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them and the Gentiles.  But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak" (Matthew 10: 18-19).

If it were for the furtherance of the cause of God, surely we would be willing that anything be given to us to speak, perhaps even if it were an utterance that we might not want to own.  Perhaps our sincerity will be made plain in our halting, agitated speech.  Or perhaps (thinking of the erroneous minutiae of Stephen's speech) we might be mistaken--at least we can be sincere.  At least we can worship God in truth.

So now I would like to try to state The Extremely Important Matter to which I at first referred.  As I said, there is an extremely important matter to be found among some of the topics we have discussed, particularly among the topics of personal agency and of specific religious beliefs.  The matter is this: all that matters is the truth.  I did not capitalize Truth; that is rubbish.  We all know what the truth is: the honest attempt to relate what honesty requires.

As regarding specific religious beliefs: Who cares?  A Hindu who trembles before a universal divinity that encompasses all virtues and demands all virtues is as much a Christian as anybody else.

As regarding personal agency: What business is it of ours?  We can scarcely say why we ourselves do what we do; it is a horror for us to imagine a mission for ourselves in which we would convert others to our beliefs--or imagine the recalcitrant among those others to be damned.

I hope to have more to say about the way Jesus sends believers into the world.  For now I will conclude with quoting Jesus from Matthew:

"And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men" (4:19).  This was Jesus' first recorded encounter with Peter and Andrew.  He did not first and foremost promise to teach them what to say; he did not first and foremost promise that anyone would listen to them.  As foreshadowed above, and as we shall see, these observations do not stand alone--Jesus sends people on missions so they can be people on missions.  It is we who decide that it matters if those missions are successful, or that it matters if those missions succeed in planting whatever phantasms we scatter over our listeners' birthright of the inborn--and inescapable--knowledge of God's attributes.

Questions About Agency

The stories of Eve and of the Samaritan woman, which we have dealt with here, are important especially in that we can get quite different views of their situations if only we view them--as this blog's logic requires--in light of the women's experiential lives.  We just have to try to ask the right questions.

Only after the expulsion from the Garden is Eve said to become pregnant.  (Of course, only after the expulsion is Adam said to have lain with her--no one has ever really been able to comment intelligently on that.)  Eve gives birth to Cain and exclaims, "I have gotten a man from the Lord" (Genesis 4:1, KJV).  The personal connection Eve feels to God's agency in the matter--it almost seems she does not understand Adam's role--raises even a deeper question than whether Eve really understood childbirth.  We should also ask whether we have really understood the "curse" on Eve.

Eve, in contrast to the snake and to her husband, is not hit with God saying, "Because thou hast. . . ."  God simply tells Eve that she will have pain in childbirth (3:16) and the translations do not make clear that she had ever been aware before of her child-bearing role.  Indeed, only after this does the text say, "And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living" (3:20).

Eve, after all (if all the noise through the ages about the importance of God's gender has ever really amounted to anything) had in the Garden known another male person--Adam.  Adam had never known another male than God, and Adam from the first had seen Eve as only an adjunct to himself.  Eve's master--Adam--was inescapably a flawed character.  Would it be any surprise that Eve would be inclined to harbor doubts about God, at least in in manner more acute than would be Adam's inclination?

So was Eve really cursed at all?  The pain of childbirth cannot be ignored, of course, but that need not be central to the question; in the Bible people were often cursed for other's transgressions.  But child-bearing itself?  Did Adam and Eve really know before God's post "Fall" pronouncement that, if children were to be had, Eve would be the one to do the bearing?  Adam, the animal-namer, would possibly have had millennia to study their wildly-varying habits (if indeed the animals were procreating at all themselves).  What immutable law of God had decreed to the first couple--or to us--that the prototype human male would not be the first child-bearer?  It would seem to have been potentially a great honor.  Of course, such wondering is of little more substance than the age-old question of whether Adam and Eve had navels.

Surely the God who made all could have made human "males" the child-bearers, starting with Adam.  Eve was chosen instead, and she acclaims God, not Adam, as the source of the fact that she has had her first-born son.  What is most important to us is the question of Eve's (indeed, in the Bible, any woman's) agency.  Was Eve ever given an even chance to Adam to sin, or not?  Was Eve really the source of the "curse" of child-bearing?

The importance of the question of agency relating to women in the Bible cannot be overstated, though it is so often ignored.  Have we ever really considered the import of Matthew 5:32: "But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery."  "Causeth her to commit adultery"?  Whose agency is involved then in the un-named woman's transgression?

In "Bible times" a woman without support could expect that she--and possibly her children--would face beggary, prostitution, starvation.  It is ridiculous to view the marriage-divorce-remarriage question the way we do, as though it were some sort of middle class soap opera, when in the ancient world it was a matter of life and death.  And yet the story of the Samaritan woman in perennially viewed as though Jesus was lamenting on her having shucked off five husbands in pursuit of a sugar-daddy or a stud.  Jesus was establishing himself to her as a prophet; it is we who have decided to pronounce on his view of the Samaritan woman.  Who knows what manner of husbands she had been married to, or whether she had been repeatedly abandoned?

And consider the "woman caught in adultery" of John's Gospel.  She is presented to Jesus and it is said of her that she was "taken in adultery, in the very act" (8:4).  Jesus, of course, effectively pardons her because no one else present will take up his dare to pronounce themselves "without sin."  All well and good.  What if the charge had been something different, say, "Master, this woman was taken in the very act of drowning her five children so that she might be free to marry a beautiful young man."  Would we still have the same story?  Surely Jesus' exacting standard of an executioner being "without sin" could still apply, yet no one will believe that Jesus would let the murdering, lustful hypothetical woman off.

Inescapably, the "woman caught in adultery" was allowed to go unpunished because the crowd could not bring themselves to punish her so cruelly.  Jesus expected people to address the world with understanding, as they themselves progressed through the arc of their lives.  It is only from such an approach that we can even begin to ask the right questions.

God Knowable and Unknowable

Human experience cannot be understood as inseparable from--well--the limitations of human experience.  This is not meant to be flippant, but it is always important for us to remember that a portion of our world consists not of what any empirical test could reveal as fact, but consists rather of our embracing notions that are little other than beliefs, but which--being untested--can stand as facts in our world-views.  Our worlds are worlds within which certain ideas are not assailed, certain ideas are constantly questioned, and certain ideas are examined critically only from time to time.

And certain ideas are of such simultaneously ephemeral and yet fundamental quality that they can only be held by us in moments of thought.  Such ideas we can learn to concentrate on, though we can only hope to in increase incrementally the frequency with which we address them, and the lengths in which we allow them to occupy us.  These episodic moments are the roused-readied-reaped cycle, churning through our days in a thousand parallel, overlapping, and widely varying ways.

These moments are of the type I described in the last post, trying to make a point about hard-edged science owing its tapestry of insights to myriad confused and fitful mental states of individuals.  Such states can often--and should--occur to religious thinkers as well--hard-edged or otherwise.

I think that this notion can inform our understanding of an otherwise puzzling aspect of Jesus' interaction with the Samaritan woman in John.

In particular, it refer to the passage in which Jesus states: "Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews" (4:22, KJV).  Here would seem to be an exclusive declaration: the only source of revelation about God and his true relationship with man comes (somehow) through Judaism--or through its adherents.  The actual narrative of the episode, however, gives an entirely different--fundamentally more nuanced--cast to Jesus' statement.  He had preceded it with:

"Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father" (4:21).  Jesus is being fundamentally inclusive--not exclusive--in his approach to spirituality, and no wonder; the theology he espouses (if one might even call it properly a theology) is a constant challenge to every particular with which a person might encapsulate thought about God.

And--though Jesus is second to none in his esteem for the great religion of the Jews--the question would naturally arise: Who is Jesus talking about when he says "salvation is of the Jews"?  Could he possibly be talking about groups or segments of first-century Judaism that have crossed his path in the Gospels?  Is he talking about the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Herodians, the chief priests, the lawyers, the scribes, the rulers, the soldiers, the lost masses, the wicked towns, doomed Jerusalem herself?  Jesus spends much of his time talking about Jews or groups of Jews who are not proper vessels of any teaching or understanding that has been withheld from the Samaritans.

But what exactly is the type of teaching or understanding the Jesus considers so important (for here lies the key to what he could mean about it coming from the Jews)?  Jesus continues:

"But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.  God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth" (4:23-24).  Jesus is talking about the ineffable, not the definable.  And Judaism has always consisted of a vital mix of very practical theology and very esoteric inspiration--it is simply the case that not many people of Judaism (or of any faith tradition) maintain a lively interaction with the things they say they believe.  (Or at least one must concede that such a view seems to be held by Jesus about his contemporaries.)

"Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews".  Judaism is given short shrift if it is not understood that Judaism encompasses both elements of Jesus' preceding statement.  Jews can both seek to understand God and seek to challenge always any ways in which they presume to understand God.

Indeed, Gentiles can--often from a different perspective--probe at the very same questions.  One is reminded of the centurion of Matthew 8, "saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented.  And Jesus saith unto him, I will come and heal him.  The centurion answered him and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed.  .  .  .When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith. no, not in Israel" (8:6-10).

That God is both knowable and unknowable, near at hand and unimaginably distant, is the sort of thing that mankind has always grasped at, and that Jesus has accorded to the earnest searchings of the Jews.  His dealings with the Samaritans emphasize not their distance from the Jews, but rather their proximity; proximity both in religious inclinations and in their potential proclivity to believe Jesus' teachings.  It is in this Samaritan setting that Jesus admonishes his disciples:

"Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest" (4:35).

A true understanding of God is never far from any person, yet it always tends to be excruciatingly distant.  We must think of the God we know, and we must think that we do not know God.  Such a thing cannot be a matter of doctrine; it is a living thing; an electric, organic, vital--and fleeting--thing.

The Great Decommissioning

I have long wondered about connections between the first chapters of Genesis and the ministry of Jesus.  Of course, I am far from alone in this, given Jesus' repeated references to "in the beginning," the collection of Eden-ish objects and events surrounding the Passion, the desire among commentators to always link beginnings to endings, etc.

I am also aware that the desire to link Eden to Gethsemane is bound to produce many false--if perhaps engaging--parallels.  Of course, none of that will keep me or other commentators from embracing the prospect.  So now I will tell you about my latest notion.

Jesus' earthly ministry comes to an end.  In Matthew, it culminates in what has been dubbed "The Great Commission."  The first couple's (though perhaps they had not yet "coupled") time in Eden had come to an end.  I think the episodes share an important quality, though I am afraid that quality is essentially negative; the episodes are most important in what prospects they deny to mankind.

Responding to the so-called Fall, God visits upon the snake the first curse:

"Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel" (3:14-15, KJV).

As I have noted before, it would seem odd to equate the snake to Satan, particularly since it would then seem superfluous for God to put enmity between Satan and "the woman."   Also, if the snake had been possessed by the devil, there would seem to be no warrant for singling out the poor creature--with its progeny--for a particularly nasty curse.  Curiously, "the woman" and her progeny--Adam does not even get equal billing--might seem to give a hint that there is something particularly female about the progenitor of the snake's nemesis (Think: "Mary"), but then there is the ensuing part about lusting for one's husband--perhaps we'd better not go there.

(Still--there might well be something to the emphasis on the woman and "her seed.")

"Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee" (3:16).

So Eve will suffer greatly in childbirth, and she will possess a physical attraction to a man for whom she might or might not possess an affinity otherwise.  And in a world of hardship and danger, she will be subject to the dominion of a man whose outstanding feature as a caretaker has been as the last domino to fall in that world's collapse.

"And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" (3:17-19).

So now Adam is bracketed, on the one hand, by an animal world--personified most acutely by the snake--arrayed against him, and on the other hand, by a plant world hostile to his husbandry.  Adam's sad-sack role, however, it just beginning.

"And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living" (3:20).  "The mother of all living"--and to think, as the ancient punsters would have it, Adam's name was mud.  The act of naming Eve is Adam's last mention in the narrative of Genesis, unless we count his passing mention as a sperm donor.  Otherwise--though no one will think child-rearing easy--out of three named sons, he brings up one to be a murderer, and another unable to realize when his fallen-countenanced elder brother is up to no good.

Eve, it should be noted, must have named the three sons, though earlier in Genesis it appears that Adam gave names as a sign of his dominion.  ". . .she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord. . . .she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel. . ."  It would be difficult to imagine a scenario in which Adam was more disempowered.  As a family head, Adam would appear to have been effectively decommissioned--and that, not merely as touching him, but in part due to the curses that fell upon him and upon his male progeny.

And should we be surprised (blessed as we are to have Jesus' testimony about the virtues of typically "unmanly" behavior) that what might be called feminine principles are often the most wholesome?  A quite pertinent example would be the types of thought processes necessary for the stereotypically-male analytic professions, whether we talk about biblical criticism or nuclear physics or what-have-you.  I have offered the notion of "roused, readied, reaped" as a proper approach to understanding Jesus' teachings, and I will suggest as well that the same approach can apply to life generally.

Scientists, for example, can postulate about theories encompassing much of the universe, though it is the imprudent scientist who forgets about the limitations he brings based on his reality as an organic being.  Timeless and sweeping though some theory might be, it must always be wondered if generalizations about existence can exceed--even if only momentarily or in a particular application--the limited, halting perspective of the observer.  We are roused-readied-reaped to any daunting question, and we must always wonder if the solution we propose is reflective of the matter's true end-point, or reflects simply what we have arrived at as exhaustion sets in.

How often might it be that the hard-edged pronouncements of great thought advances--the ground-breaking discoveries of the "great men" of science--are the result of soul-piercing, visceral convulsions of all-too-human men and women who will admit to their weaknesses and misunderstandings?  After the fact, unfortunately, we humans are inclined to forget our discomfiture--and the same applies by extension to biblical commentators, who want to look at moments in the Bible and simultaneously cram into such moments volumes of doctrine that could scarcely have been borne by the participants.

I contend that the sad reality of Adam's effectual decommissioning can help us understand Jesus' parting message to the eleven at the end of Matthew.  The denominations, especially those claiming to be "evangelical," make much of The Great Commission, but it must be wondered if there really is all that much there.  That is, has the understandable pathos of the end of this and the other Gospels been allowed to cloud and clutter the actual language?

"And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.  Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world" (Matthew 28: 18-20).

Jesus said, "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth"; there is no mention here of the power of the Church, of the believer, or most importantly, of the senior of believers.  Simply--all has been set right in the cosmos.  "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations"; you know, as we believers would be inclined to do at any rate.  ". . . baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. . . "--all Three of which aspects of the Godhead were represented at Jesus' baptism, and all Three of which perfused Jesus' ministry, though the particulars of "baptism" were not emphasized.  "Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you"--you know, the importance of teaching, again.  ". . . and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. . . "--so we don't have to get worked up about all that "End Time" chronology.

To hear evangelical radio rantings, one would think that The Great Commission included Jesus spouting about congregations empowered to root out heresy; about missions bent on rooting out the disgusting practices of the heathen; about which hideous dictatorships to be supported on the basis of their receptivity to missions; about baptism of this or that sort, here or there, once or again or not at all; about believers pronouncing on which headlines presage the Anti-Christ as the curtain begins to fall on missionary efforts.

I propose what I think to be a more apt digestion of The Great Commission.  Picture Jesus in the stereotypical I'm-losing-my-patience gesture: slightly bowed forward, slightly shrugging, arms half-raised, elbows half-bent, palms spread wide--and a look on his face that says, "Well. . ???"  Jesus, at the end of Matthew, is not saying anything that he hasn't said all along.

Jesus at the end of Matthew is just telling his disciples to get on with it.  To get on with living; to get on with what a person would do who was lucky enough to be exposed to the teaching of Jesus' ministry; to get on with what has been taught always by the Creation created through Jesus.

To get on with it.  Jesus was sending his disciples away stripped down.  Jesus wasn't giving them anything to do that--in a different era--hadn't been demanded of Adam.  The disciples had no reason to expect some special commission.  So Jesus De-Commissioned them.

Servants of the Family of God

Perhaps now we are getting somewhere.  The overriding logic of humanity's salvation is that of master and servant, rather than that of father and child.  The master-servant connection is the basis of the religion that Jesus founded.

The father-child connection, however, is the imagery most amenable to co-opting and marketing by the denominations.  Make a person view religion through the lens of the family, and that person's family life will be held as hostage by the denominations, against the possibility that the person will think for himself or herself.  (And that does not even consider at this moment Jesus' earth-shattering negative views of family life.)

I am thinking most intently now about the evangelical organizations that claim that a person does not need Christianity for a religion, but rather for a relationship.  We must, it is said, have God as our Father, and Jesus as our Brother.  This is an unsupportable take on what we need for salvation.  What we need for salvation is to do what Jesus told us to do.

This is displayed most clearly at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, which is the only Synoptic Gospel that ends without an obvious artifice.  No snake-handling or poison-drinking as in "Mark," and no loitering about in Jerusalem to star in an up-coming sequel, as in Luke-Acts.  In Matthew, Jesus says that his disciples should look for him in Galilee and--lo and behold--they find him in Galilee.

"And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted" (Matthew 28:17, KJV).  These are "the eleven disciples," not some motley crowd, and the part about "some doubted" sure makes it sound like this was their first encounter with Jesus post-Resurrection (unlike the accounts in the other two Synoptics.)  I am saying this because I think it supports the contention that the post-Resurrection part of Matthew is free of the shortcomings that haunt Mark and Luke.

What then does Jesus say to the eleven in Matthew, even to the eleven that in lighter moments he calls "brethren"?

"Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.  Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world" (28:18-20).

The "power" that Jesus describes himself as possessing is shown as an element of mastery, not as a legacy of a family of believers; the baptism that he describes reflects a family relationship within the Godhead, not as touching a family of believers; and the disciples are to assume a leadership role as compared to converts, just as the disciples are to yield in submission to Jesus as their master.  Any of these elements might be--and are--discussed endlessly within the context of a parent-child conceptualization of salvation, but it would be ridiculous to view the parent-child relationship as normative.

We are saved if we do what we are told.  We are children of God if we do what we are told.  It would seem only prudent for us to do what we are told, and for us to "man-up" and "woman-up", accepting that the grace necessary for our salvation can reside--without violence to God's nature--in his merciful appraisal of our efforts.

Servants From the First

I think we should begin this post with the last paragraph of the last post:

"Only in placing himself in servitude is the Prodigal Son (as Jesus unfolds the story) returned to the status of sonship.  The first expectation of salvation is an attitude of servanthood, and a person who does not recognize this attitude of servanthood as reflecting 'the image of God' is a person who does not understand the themes under which Creation was formed."

There is much more to this business of servanthood, and it is particularly important in that it must be understood to take precedence over the idea of son-ship or daughter-ship.  The idea of being a child of God is an idea that must be carefully examined.  There is not even a direct warrant to assume that the concept of "son" applies to Adam in view of his relationship to God.  (One can always say that God foreknew Adam's fate, including his incompleteness without Eve and his siring of God's "grandchildren," but that is a philosopher's game, and a blasphemous one at that.  The God of the Bible is continually asserting that he does this or that because of how his creatures have acted, and his creatures are not automatons.)

The Gospel of Luke, thousands of years after Eden, calls Adam the "son of God," but that phrase is not in Genesis.  We do not even know what the concept of "family" would mean in Genesis, at least until we read of the immediate family of Abram.  We cannot know if Cain's monstrous utterance, "Am I my brother's keeper?" was all that we take it to be.  Was he--in light of any concepts he absorbed--his brother's keeper?  Certainly both Cain and God subscribe to wretched Cain's notion that "every one that findeth me shall slay me" (4:14, KJV).  So even his closest relatives would slay him for a previously un-thought-of crime?  Even his father, who yet lived?  Or perhaps that monumentally horrible "family" was simply in the habit of seeking each other's blood?

Perhaps a better question than the famous "Where did Cain get his wife?" would be "Where would Cain expect to encounter his brother's avenger?"

Even the more benign aspects of Adam's growing family exist only in the sketchy framework of an ancient story.  A point is made that in the time of Adam's grandson Enos, "then began men to call upon the name of the Lord" (4:26).  This name of God seems to come out of the blue centuries later to Moses--when it comes out of the burning bush--leading many to wonder if the Genesis reference is an anachronism.  It would perhaps be more important to note that "the Lord" as a name of God has been--not without reason--attributed to God's covenant relationship with his people, the Israelites that Moses is expected to champion.  They are to be God's servant people.  Certainly there is nothing about "the Lord" as a name that particularly connotes family ties or God as Father.

So the sons and grandsons of Adam do not, as far as we can tell, call upon God as their father.  It might be said that the "son"-ship of "man"-kind was to be fleshed out in "unfolding revelation"--that perpetual invitation to spew balderdash--but Jesus did not as a rule take kindly to such an approach, preferring instead to reflect persistently on how things existed from the beginning.  I try to do likewise, and so I must contend that the Father role of God--implicit always in his character of Creator and Master--is not understood correctly by us when--firstly--we seek to understand what we must do to be saved, and then--secondly--we insist on finding a formula for adoption by a Father who would be surprised to learn that he has not been father all along.'

What God has been--unquestionably--all along is Master.  He was Adam's master, and he was Adam's master before Adam started acting like a spoiled child rather than a faithful servant.  If Adam had done what he was told by his master, Adam would have enjoyed an eternity of not-very-sinful, not-often-frustrated existence.  That is what Eden was, for Adam and Eve--as surely as Eve was a sinner for sharing blasphemous conversation with the snake, whether she had eaten of the tree or not.

None of this seems to have been lost on Jesus, who knows perfectly well that it is the obedient heart of the servant, not the mercy-seeking heart of the aspiring, grown "child", that constitutes the definitive aspect of salvation.  To be a "child of God" is what we should seek as a result of what we do, but what we must actually do is follow the commands of our Master.  The master-servant relationship (perhaps better referred to as a "commission") is that which determines a person's status; on the other hand, the parent-child relationship is an inspiring illustration, but it is malleable and evocative while the servant requirement is not.

In Matthew, Jesus says:

"But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven. . . .Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matthew 5:44-48).

Which is it then?  That you must do well enough on the loving, blessing, do-gooding, praying scale so that you can be a child of God?  Or that you must be perfect to be a child of God?  Can you attain that family status?  Can you lose that family status?  I should suggest that we look straight at the text and note what is constant and unquestionable: it is the servant status that matters, and it is the servant status that controls.  The "child of God" status is flexible and evocative, and it is entirely lamentable that the "child of God" imagery has been employed to usurp and deny so much of God's authority over the believer.

The Image of the Servant

Genesis 6:13 can be translated apparently a number of ways, but the general gist of it would seem to come through in the KJV:

"And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth."

And so, if the conventional interpretations are held, it would seem inescapable that God, who brought the earth into existence through effortless, sublime command, has now decided to visit his judgment not only upon the sinful mankind that he created, but also upon their smallest of children and "all flesh, wherein is the breath of life" (6:17).  Leaving aside the--not inconsequential--matter of the drowned infants, there is also the seemingly unjustifiable destruction of the animals.  Of what are they guilty?  Could not the God who devised the instruments of plague and pestilence have whittled mankind down to Noah and his crew without destroying innocent creatures?

I will start, however, with the first--mistaken--postulate that I mentioned: that God "brought the earth into existence through effortless, sublime command."  That is the standard notion.  By contrast, the Gospel of John maintains that Creation was made through Jesus, and we have no idea what suffering that--even partial--sundering of the Godhead entailed (for indeed God can suffer, or the Bible lies about his sorrow over mankind from end to end.)

We are presented then, from the outset, with the picture of Jesus and his father as servant and master--brought to consummation with Jesus' incarnation and submission to God's will.  And we are presented in the Gospels with Jesus' enlargement of the servant-master relationship: that he who would be master must be servant of all, and that the most assiduous of servants is the master who attends to the needs of his charges--though his charges be nominally his subordinates.  The relationship between master and servant must never be forgotten, and it informs the questions before us.

We can now come to a more well-rounded appreciation of the question of the animals' fate.  The animals did not deserve to be punished as they were--that was the fault of mankind who, we will remember, were given custodianship of nature.  Neither, however, are we bound to the simplistic, standard notion that animals are never to be charged with guilt.  That easy generalization simply does not fit the thinking process present in the Bible.  Just ask Balaam's ass: "And the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?" (Numbers 22:28).

We might imagine posing the matter to the snake in the Garden, though we should probably despair of getting a straight answer.  More soberly, there is the admonition after the Flood: "And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it. . . .Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man" (9:5-6).

And yet what then of the assertion that "in the image of God made he man"?  Most usually, the conception of man made in God's image is a moral conception--that only human beings possess moral lives, are subject to the requirements of this or that salvation economy, and are liable to eternal damnation.  (Torture an animal to the uttermost, then, and upon death it will either cease to exist, or go off to some storybook glade somewhere; the otherwise horrifying ill-use of animals can be justified endlessly if it furthers God's People or God's Purposes.)

Is that really how Genesis portrays the concept of man made in God's image?  In the "first story" of man's creation (the Sixth Day) we read: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion. . . ." (1:26).  Man is then created and endowed with dominion over a vegetarian world--and surely we do not entertain unseemly notions about what "dominion" entails.

In the "second story" of Creation Adam is formed by God from the dust, "And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it" (2:15).  Again, it is said that man is created and charged with the care of Creation.

(Then, as I have said, Adam shows himself to be unsatisfied by the arrangement, leading to the creation of Eve and, thereby, the creation of the rest of mankind.  It was man's failing, not God's design, that lead to marriage and family life and all the ills of society.  It is, of course, no surprise that the master-servant paradigm fails so often in our approaches to life with our fellow humans--it was really not intended to be put to such use.  And then, of course, there are the endless horrors of Christian--and other religious--beliefs about families as "God's design"; by such means families are set a distance apart from our best communal attempts to understand human relationships, and families are so often lorded over by mini-God fathers visiting effectual damnation upon the weaker members.)

Then we have the wicked snake and The Fall, though any garden with a wicked snake in it would seem to be fallen already.  Much has been made of the snake's words, "ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil" (3:5), as though this bore on the notion that "the image of God" had to do with moral capability, but then of course God created man in his image, not with the capability to eat a fruit and attain his image.

And so then we have all the sordid events that lead to the Flood and its aftermath.  Now the animals will have a dread of man, and vicious predation and brutal justice will be the orders of the day.  Man has attained his greatest powers of lordship, at the expense of lording it over a corrupted realm.  It is very important to remember this fact, and to realize thereby that the primary sundering between mankind and God is not a break in the parent-child relationship, but a break in the master-servant relationship.  All of this folds back upon the original question of "the image of God."

The image of God--and this is not all that surprising--is properly related to our place as a representative of God in Creation.  Jesus demands that we display the holiness of God, not that we display mere submission to a holy God.  The flowers of the field can testify to the majesty of God.  (Just as a fig tree, let alone an animal, can show itself lacking before God.)  We do no honor to God as his sons and daughters if we do not do the things that God does, no matter how much noise we make about the greatness of God and the great extent to which we fail to deserve his mercy.

The Prodigal Son reorients himself to how he can serve in his father's household, and even as one of the "hired men" he would expect to have duties, and rights, and responsibilities.  He would have a place, and be a servant to all he would master, and stand as the master of the house on keeping the night watch--just as all of us in service are of little use unless we take ownership of the organization's mission.

Only in placing himself in servitude is the Prodigal Son (as Jesus unfolds the story) returned to the status of sonship.  The first expectation of salvation is an attitude of servanthood, and a person who does not recognize this attitude of servanthood as reflecting "the image of God" is a person who does not understand the themes under which Creation was formed.

Conceit and Decay

There is an important linkage between our human tendency to defame and belittle God through our conceptualizations, and the tendency--as reported in the Genesis account of the generation of Noah--for us to undergo moral decay.  We can see this in the Bible's account of that generation--if we are willing to wonder if it is more than just an origin-myth.

Genesis reports: "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (6:5, KJV).  The King James rendition is about as close as one can get to calling the persons of that generation pure evil; "every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually."

Even in the KJV, however, Jesus presents a somewhat different picture: "For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that No'e entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away" (Matthew 28:38-39).  It would be difficult to maintain that Jesus' picture is one of people whose hearts harbored thoughts of "only evil continually"; perhaps if they spent their waning days abducting, raping, torturing, and killing--but "marrying and giving in marriage"?

And this is where we must decide if we are going to presume that the Bible begins with origin-myths, or not.  A purely wicked era of pure evil, as the KJV seems to want to relate--how can we learn anything from that, or pretend that it ever existed?  Did generations really pass in those days without--as the most obvious examples--a shred of marital or parental care?  We might as well be asked to believe in the mythiest of myths (humanity spawned by centaurs, to take a rather tame example) than be asked to glean lessons from mythical generations of people fundamentally alien to the common human experience.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, the generation of Noah was all too typical of the common human experience.  Translators differ as to the particulars, but God's general condemnation of the "heart" of that generation is attended by references to human hearts "conceiving" or "scheming".  That is to say, it is not that the inclination to evil permeated every tendency of those persons, but that it was present from the first in all of their conceptualizations.  Their very thought life was evil, and it poisoned everything about their culture and their world.

So I say again, there is an important linkage between our human tendency to defame and belittle God through our conceptualizations, and the tendency--as reported in the Genesis account of the generation of Noah--for us to undergo moral decay.  We do not think rightly about God and his expression through Creation, and it is certain that in some measure we never will.  While instances of us thinking wrongly about God and instances of us behaving badly toward our neighbors are just that--instances--still they are fundamentally different.  We can catch ourselves in bad behavior and apologize and seek to make amends.  We can even apologize to God for transgressions against him--as we view such transgressions.

Our tendency to think wrongly about God, however, is far more pernicious.  Such wrong thinking--inevitably attended by great presumption--becomes the very basis on which we found our standards of right and wrong.  We do the most hideous things because we believe God tells us to.  I know that at this moment I am saying something that seems ridiculously obvious, but I might reply that the point was not so obvious for Jesus to have left unspoken: "yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service" (John 16:2).

It is not merely the tendency toward evil that drives us into downward spirals of moral decay; for this we require also the tendency to conceive of an existence--more properly, a succession of momentarily-fashioned existences defined by our own conceits--in which our ever-worse behavior is understandable to us--perhaps even justifiable to us.  We define our own universes, and we assign to our conceptions of God their places in those universes.

What I am describing is common to humanity--now and in Noah's time.  The only thing any of us can ever do about our thought-lives--lives that attend our thoughts because they are our thoughts--is to fall back on trust in the God who fathered us.  On the parent who loves us.  "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?" (Matthew 7:11).

Born to Who Made Us

I ended the last post (that is, the one before my apologies for bad blogging technique) with the following statement: "I think we should begin philosophy with the God of 'We' and the God of 'I am'; the God of the origin-myth Garden and the God of man's first grasping at the ultimate."

Of course I am describing God as either a conceptualized person within a context, or as a superintendent of all contexts.  I can pursue either approach to the best of my ability (okay, that is, to the best of my ability to rouse my energies to give my best efforts) but I am bound to fall short.  I know I am not saying anything novel here.

What I do mean to say--and what I think is crucial to properly understanding our relationship to God--is that it is not enough to admit to failure in viewing God within a context, or in viewing God outside of all contexts.  What we must also admit is that we transgress in our relationship to God--or at least reveal our indolence--when we allow ourselves comfortable residence in those modes of thought that muse about God dealing with this or that, or that muse about God's ineffable, uncharacterizable traits.

To try to explain: First, there is the business of our "viewing God within a context."  As an example, I am reminded of the modern complaint from much of Christianity about the fancied conflict between religion and science, shown as starkly as anywhere else in contentions about the age of the earth.  Only some Christian Creationists are "young-earthers," taking issue with conventional geology itself.  Many other Christians are comfortable with an old Earth, but object to the notion that the Bible has been shown therefore to be lacking, when it was always intended to present Deeper Truths, or some such.

What must be understood about any objection from Christians about a science-heavy modern predisposition is that Christianity has always been science-heavy.  Science measures time and records the ostensible results of time's passing.  Science also, quite logically, extrapolates--from observable experience and observable evidence--to notions about time as a fundamental dimension, whether plotted by itself as an infinitude back and forth, or conceptualized in some mind-wrenching interplay with other dimensions (or dimensions at least mind-wrenching to me.)

But what has any of this theorizing about time to do with our understanding (or not) of God?  The notion expressed in the Book of Job ("Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?" (38:4, KJV)) cuts no more against the atheist than the believer, if the believer is intent on theorizing about God's relationship to time as a dimension.  Unfortunately, many Christian thinkers, even from the start, chose a "scientific" approach to the great questions of the universe, extrapolating from common human experiences to lay out a framework that--despite their utterances of regard for God--has served in reality to constrain God in their imaginings.

And then there is the other problematic stance: not viewing God within a context, but viewing God as the author of all contexts.  It is easy enough for Christian philosophers to ascribe to God not only all estimable qualities, but also to credit him with having created all estimable qualities.  The only art or skill involved would be shown in the inventiveness of such conceptualizations.  But who is a person to be doing such conceptualizing, and upon what does that person stand?

A person who ascribes to God all estimable qualities--not as an outpouring of a moment of reverence, praise, or thanks--but as a philosophical stance, really is just ensnared in a tautology.  What is it to God that some philosopher whirls about in this or that circle of, say, "God is all purity and all purity is God?"--and the same for all justice, all dimension, all physicality, etc,--everything considered substanceless without his will?

What I am stumbling toward is an assertion that another conceptualization of our relationship to God is necessary other than God viewed in the context of our philosophically-surveyed universe, or God viewed by us as the author of a universe that we ascribe to him even as we ascribe to ourselves the role of viewer.  What would be a proper metaphor?

I could throw out the modern-ish (and I grant rather childish) metaphor of a cosmic railroad train--for the sake of argument one traveled not merely by us as individuals but by us as succeeding, overlapping generations.  What can be conceptualized by us is mostly viewed outside of the windows, unavailable for our further inspection.  We cannot see where the train is going and--in the train's cosmic, age-old manifestation of my fancy--we can neither see where it has been nor rely on accounts of where it has been.  Nor do we know how the cosmos cradling the cosmic train had its beginning or is supported in its existence.

Rather silly, I will admit, but it will suffice, I believe, to tie in with this blog's insistence on the "roused, readied, reaped" theme.  We do not possess certainty about the dimensions of existence, and we do not possess certainty about any entity superintending over existence (if I might be forgiven such a clumsy allusion to the divine.)  More importantly, our conceptualizations of existence are dependent on the circumstances of our lives.  We are roused to existence in an ultimately unknowable and unplottable journey, we are formed and molded (our "readyings"), and we come to be reaped in our ends.

And so I come to this blog's focus on Jesus.  Jesus said, "Ye must be born again" (John 3:7, KJV).  Modern translations often read "born from above."  Whichever; the Christian fascination with this important phrase (I say "fascination" to characterize an over-blown response) is a fascination not with the phrase itself, but with the seductive possibilities it presents when an interpreter sees the believer being "born" in some fashion into an endlessly-discussable framework of a "salvation economy."

To the denominations the being "born" is plottable against a carefully-surveyed universe of revelation; to the denominations the being "born" is understandable in revelation's teachings about the God who created not merely the universe, but also created the means by which such miserable inhabitants of the universe as we could be raised of a moment to son-ship or daughter-ship to God.

All well and good, I should say; one could make a rather fine religion from such notions.  Only one real problem exists: Jesus did not subscribe to such notions.  Jesus did not show a man how to gain son-ship to God; he showed him how to transfer his acknowledged son-ship from his earthly father to his heavenly father, and to recognize thereby that the heavenly father is now and always was the only one.  "Our Father, who art in heaven" is not merely addressed to a person's "heavenly Father"; it is an assertion that a human being has no other father.  The believer is to hate his earthly father and refuse to address him as such--though his erstwhile father is as deserving of love and regard as any other person.

What then was Jesus describing with the language of being "born"?  His further description explains: "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and wither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit" (3:8).  One of the first things learned by most amateur theologians is that the word translated "wind" and the word translated "Spirit" are one and the same (and that the conversation was almost certainly not in Greek.)  Indeed, the Greek word is only rarely translated "wind" in the New Testament, but Jesus' further words make that translation effectively mandatory: "If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?" (3:12).

What Jesus is doing (and I know I am flirting with impertinence) is throwing the believer into the first-century version of the cosmic railroad train.  We do not know the beginning or the ending of the world (or our personal worlds, in case anyone is counting on living in a structured anticipation of the End Times.)  We do not know the beginning or the ending of the spiritual realm.  And we do not know where one realm ends and the other begins (which makes them, in terms of what faces us, one and the same.)  Jesus uses better language: "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and wither it goeth."

What we are "born" to in Jesus' formulation is an identification with God as our father and the realm of God as the place in which we live.  We live in a place in which mountains will leap into the sea at our command--geology be damned.  If we do not believe this, then we do not believe Jesus.  (It is not Jesus' fault if we lack the faith to move mountains.)

We do not change, other than in the fact of our new attachment to God as our father (with the concomitant staggering prospects of what might be required of us.)  The world then is different to us, yet still it roars past our fleeting lives, as ultimately unknowable as ever.  We as a species have seen this before.  Adam was a sinner before and after The Fall, and there was strife in the natural world before The Fall as after--yet Adam's orientation to God was changed.  Noah, despite initially enjoying God's favor, was a sinner before the flood and a sinner after.  The world did not change--not in the things of substance.

We can think of God as a great worker within the universe.  We can think of God as the great worker who made and sustains the universe.  None of that will save us.

We worship God when we trust him as a loving parent, who fashioned for us a fitting realm in which we work through our pains, fears, and sorrows.  That is how we are saved.

Sorry About That

Sorry about the extraneous text at the start of the last post.

The God of We and of I Am

aaacrThe God of We and of I AmA curious, brief episode occurs after the story of Cain and Abel.  Eve gives birth to Seth, who fathers Enos.  At the time of Enos (or, as some translators would have it, first from the lips of Enos) people began to use the name usually rendered as "the Lord" for God.  This name for God, of course, is the famous "I am" that got Jesus in such trouble, having effectively claimed it for himself (John 8:58).

So--perhaps even while Adam yet lived--we have two fundamentally different views of God.  God is the anthropomorphic figure, inexplicably using the "we" pronoun, walking through the Garden in the cool of the day, and also God is the quintessence of all existence.  God is either understandable within a framework of existence, or God superintends even that framework.

This blog will have to struggle with that tension, on at least two planes.  The first plane is the question of belief--of how we address ourselves to the knowable and/or the unknowable.  The second plane is the question of how we are to properly orient ourselves against what we know, what we think we know, and what we must try to know.

Before I begin I have to dispense with--in my amateurish way--that statement of Descartes usually rendered in English as "I think, therefore I am."  Despite his attempt at a first philosophical statement, Descartes has already fallen into unwarranted presumption.  Would it not be as correct for him to say "We think, therefore we are"?  Has he any warrant to assume that the phenomenon of thought with which he begins is not the combined product of multiple processes, perhaps including the communal output of multiple minds?  Does he not actually visualize an individual entity thinking, yet pretend that the thought itself is that with which he begins?

And then there is that "exist" business.  Is existence separable from some context in which the "existing" entity is registered?  Does Descartes not also postulate the existence of a universe surrounding the speaker of the phrase, "I think, therefore I am"?  Is not the true beginning of Descartes' philosophical journey simply "I think", a statement that--without presupposed context--leads nowhere?

For my part, I think we should begin philosophy with the God of "We" and the God of "I am"; the God of the origin-myth Garden and the God of man's first grasping at the ultimate.