Satan Can Always Fall From Everywhere

In Luke Jesus sends out the Seventy, two by two, with a commission similar to that which he gives to the Twelve in Luke and the other two Synoptics.  As the Seventy recount their successful mission, Jesus exclaims, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven" (Luke 10:18, KJV).  That Jesus' statement should be such a challenge to theologians shows the knots into which theology has been tied.

In Luke, as in the other two Synoptics, Jesus is described early on as being tempted by Satan.  Satan tries to appeal to Jesus' concern for his own bodily needs, for his own safety, and for his all-too-human desire to control the world.  The Seventy, as the narrative would have it, have triumphed over the same matters: "eating and drinking such things as they give" instead of worrying about provisions; taking neither staff nor sword; and, rather than trying to assert control over their surroundings, proclaiming instead, "The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you."

All that is necessary to dispel the theologians' confusion about the application of "Satan falling" to the story of the Seventy is to dispense with concerns about time and place--as though the kingdom of God would ever be bounded by such measures.

Earthly Does Not Mean Understandable

After the myths of Genesis 1 to 11, the Bible sets itself to ostensibly historical accounts.  At least some real-seeming actions of real-seeming people are described, but that does not mean that such stories comport with the approach to story-telling that Jesus uses.  The differences can be described in two main ways.

First, the Bible tells stories about people's involuntary or reflexive or compulsive acts.  Sarah laughs at an ostensibly laughable prospect, and much is made of that.  Moses strikes a rock twice with a rod, and much is made of that.  Compare those examples to Jesus describing a man's two sons:

....and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to day in my vineyard.  He answered and said, I will not: but afterward he repented, and went.  And he came to the second, and said likewise.  And he answered and said, I go, sir: and went not.  Whether of them twain did the will of his father?  They say unto him, The first. (Matthew 21:28-31, KJV)

Which, of course, is the right answer for Jesus, and for us.  Impetuousness or resistance or hesitation are but moments, and they can constitute--or immediately abut--instances of involuntary reaction.  It would be madness to believe that such moments reveal the substance of a person's soul, yet in the Bible (and in far too much of our lives today) such flashing moments are seized upon as occasions for sanctimonious judgment.

The second way that Jesus' stories differ from the Bible at large is in the matter of grand (that is to say, life-defining) plans.  Our estimations of historical figures are replete with recountings of the lives of people who achieve great and decades-consuming goals, or who constitute tragic figures in that their ambitions or visions are not realized.  One might be reminded of David's intention of building a house for his God:

And it was in the heart of David my father to build an house for the name of the Lord God of Israel.  And the Lord said unto David my father, Whereas it was in thine heart to build an house unto my name, thou didst well that it was in thine heart.  Nevertheless thou shalt not build the house.... (1 Kings 8:17-19)

And of course the stories of the kings of Israel and Judah are filled with their ambitions for the establishment of national prominence--and filled as well with the prophet's pronouncements that this or that royal scheme to those ends was an affront to God.  Hovering over all this drama is the persistent idea that practicality in such matters ought to be irrelevant--an Israel or Judah that was right with God could not come to a bad end on the battlefield.

Such were not Jesus' stories of people's ambitions--ambitions, however noble, that can lead in the pinch to those same people compromising their virtue.  Moreover, it is not the nobility of the ambition (or the piety of the striver) that matters most, but rather the humility of persons in recognizing the vanity of much to which we aspire:

For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?  Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish.  Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand?  Or else, while the other is yet a great way off, he sendeth an ambassage, and desireth conditions of peace.  So likewise, whosever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14: 28-33)

"Forsaking all that he hath" can often mean forsaking what are ostensibly laudable goals.  There is special difficulty in laying aside those things that--paradoxically--can seem the most self-sacrificing.  Great plans; great ambitions; great worldviews; great ambitions for obtaining views of the world, of the universe, or of existence--all can be nothing more than vain graspings on our part, draining the substance out of our strivings.  The "cannot be my disciple" conclusion from Jesus above is followed in the text immediately by "Salt is good, but if the salt have lost his savour...."

Any notion we have of our lives or of our ambitions is necessarily a notion that rests on our conceptions about the flow of time.  We do not really know time.  The "now" of the present is gone before we know it, and if we are honest with ourselves we do not know our pasts or those of anyone else.  And as for the future: "Thou fool, this night thy soul will be required of thee...." (Luke 12:20).

These, then, are the two novel ideas that Jesus gives us.  First, we are not the creatures of our moments, but we are rather vital, convoluting, coalescing assemblages of all that we experience and understand about ourselves.  That is both the only realistic way--and the only humble way--for us to view ourselves.  Second, we do not understand our existence.  Much less do we have warrant to effectively stand over our existence and pronounce upon it, which is really what we are doing when we speak of religion, regardless of endless utterances about total depravity and unmerited grace.  If there is anything "unmerited" that God gives us, it is something beyond our understanding.  To God we owe glory, not sweat-stained treatises about his glory.

Or to put it more succinctly: We are suspended between an earthly existence that we do not understand, and a heavenly existence that we do not understand.  Whenever we contend otherwise, we are making godlings of ourselves--whichever realm we are describing.  Jesus speaks to Nicodemus in John 3 of "earthly things" and of "heavenly things," but it is foolishness to neglect the fact that "earthly things" in the conversation does not mean "understandable things":

Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.  The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth. . . . If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?

To be born again (that is--crucially--as the scholars tell us, "born from above") is to be born to a cognizance of an existence that launches away from earth and is crushed down by heaven.  The "again-ness" is "again-and-again-ness," as assuredly as "take up the cross" means not to dare execution in the end, but to be executed all the way--as assuredly as Jesus through his life--through all eternity as we might understand it--bore the horror of his execution.

To be "born from above" is not a one-time thing, or a sacramental thing, or a grace-alone thing.  It is the only thing of any proper human existence, proper human existence being continually--or as continually as may be--characterized by a new-born-ish exposure to every unfolding development.  We know nothing of earth or heaven (if we are honest enough to recognize that we know not of their boundaries and therefore of their totalities), and when we recognize that we know nothing of earth and heaven, we are as likely as ever to grasp in innocent wonder at the proper things, and to leave the foul things alone.

Only when we feel at home anywhere are we likely to construct ourselves the shelters in which we crouch from the light of God.  We will do almost anything, it is true, to avoid being launched out of our cowering-places into the crushing light of heaven.  The burst of light of new wonder--analogous to the burst of light to the newborn--is the narrow path to the light from above.

The Riot of Evil as the Portion of Man

Adam rejected the sole love of God, and so got himself a wife.  Adam did not marvel at Eve as being a wonderful creature in herself, but as being of the essence of his "bone of bone" and "flesh of flesh".  Adam might as well have exulted in his own burgeoning "bone of flesh".  Well done, Man.

(Adam's billions of kinsmen might also be judged by how well they have adhered to "sole love" of any person--and of course Jesus defined the thought of unfaithfulness as being the very act itself.  Well done, Man.)

Adam, the first recipient of God's first warning--and subjected only to the wiles of his wife rather than those of the snake--failed to keep himself (and possibly his future offspring) free from the stain of sin.  Well done, Man.

And Noah: His is a pitiful story.  Cursed mankind would have been freed from earthly suffering if only Noah had not "found grace in the eyes of the Lord"--all alive then would have perished in the flood.  Instead, Noah and his family survived.  Instead, Noah survived, only to bequeath to us--through his curse on Canaan--the germs of race-hatred and genocide.  Well done, Man.

The Predicament is the Portion of the Reader

So now we are in something of a predicament.  Mankind before the flood is totally depraved, a situation that Genesis describes as quite unsatisfactory.  But, one might ask, what is the problem?  So a bunch of thoroughly evil creatures do thoroughly evil things to each other--so what?  (Just as one might ask: "So God could opt to destroy those worthless creatures--so what?")  Destroyed by God or destroyed by each other--what is the difference?  They all have it coming, and the earth would be well rid of them.

It might even be said that the situation resolves itself to irrelevance; if the people of the earth are totally depraved, how then can their depravity be actualized?  No wickedness they might unleash upon each other would be--in the final analysis--undeserved.

Or are we to assume that the innocent victim here is God himself, either neglected or ill-used by his creatures?  The text does not support this, centering instead on the outrages inflicted by humans upon one another:

"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" (Genesis 6:13, KJV).

The predicament stands.

Extreme Evil as the Portion of Humanity

It would appear that Eve's second son had some good in him.  Of course, the fact that Abel's sacrifice was found acceptable to God would not, in the "faith alone" Christian formulation, mean necessarily that Abel had done anything laudable, or acted out of seemly intent.  It is only conjecture that might (attempt to) tell us why Abel's sacrifice was found acceptable.

Maybe Abel didn't have any good in him.  Maybe Cain and Abel were both totally depraved.  We only know that Cain was downcast after his sacrifice was not accepted.  God tells Cain that his negative attitude is an invitation to sin.  Cain, in a place in history before the provision of punishment for killing human beings was declared to Noah, does a logical (though, we might imagine, ineffectual) thing to address his own negative attitude: Cain kills the brother whose sacrifice was accepted by God, removing--for Cain--that which was emblematic of his own failing.

Cain is then punished by God with the threat--unrealized, it must be noted--of reducing Cain to "a fugitive and a vagabond."  To this Cain responds:

"Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me" (Genesis 4:14, KJV).

If God had established by then what he definitely established later (the death penalty for murder) then the situation in the immediately above quote would have been a quite satisfactory one.  It would appear, however, that Cain being put to death for murder would not have been a necessary goal for those whom he feared.  Apparently merely being "a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth" was enough to get someone killed, and little wonder.  This was (or rapidly was becoming) the age in which "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).

The Worship of God as the Portion of Woman

After their expulsion from Eden, "And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord" (Genesis 4:1, KJV).

Our study of the "early history of humanity" through the Book of Genesis tends to be a study of the overall, when perhaps it would be good just to proceed through the story incrementally.  I say this here for a specific reason: Prior to and including The Fall (so-called), the words of the Lord indicate no personal involvement from him in the unfolding history of humanity.  Adam and Eve might have just lived their lives, and their offspring would have lived their respective lives, and all would be settled after death.

It is perhaps worth noting, then, that Eve declares unbidden that Cain's birth was mediated for her through the Lord.  No such expression of gratitude (or at least shared responsibility) has been demanded from Eve, yet she offers it nonetheless.  This is a curious act on the part of a person who is ostensibly a member of a species thoroughly depraved.  If indeed Eve's act is a remnant of some residual goodness remaining until mankind's point of total depravity (Genesis 6:5), we are not so informed.

This, of course, would make us think about that supposed state of total evil on the part of humanity.  Could the species have continued to exist if the only thoughts in the hearts of women--in this case, mothers--was only evil all the time?  Sure, men--in this case, fathers, if they were worthy of the name--might be totally depraved, but mothers?

The only way we can understand a totally depraved humanity is as a collective figure of mythology--not untrue, as if it were a lie, but unrealistic insofar as it might relate to our present understanding of our species.  I believe that we will find that woman--as a collective protagonist in the myth--is more of a hero than man.

Evidence of the Existence of Godliness

There is a certain puzzle in the varying Synoptic Gospel accounts of the centurion who witnessed Jesus' death.  Mark has:

"And when the centurion, which stood over against him, saw that he so cried out, and gave up the ghost, he said, Truly this man was the Son of God" (Mark 15:39, KJV).

Translations differ about the above passage from Mark, but one element is definite: the passage's clear depiction of the centurion as being in the immediate vicinity of Jesus.

Compare this to the analogous passage in Luke:

"Now when the centurion saw what was done, he glorified God, saying, Certainly this was a righteous man" (Luke 23:47).

This above passage from Luke follows immediately after the account of Jesus' death, but its description of the centurion as observing the events is more general.  The centurion is not described as "over against" Jesus.

In Matthew, the centurion is shown as being removed even farther from the immediacy and the vicinity of Jesus' death, at least insofar as the centurion is not nailed rhetorically into the space of Jesus' passing.  Matthew reads:

"Now when the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus, saw the earthquake, and those things that were done, they feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God" (Matthew 27:54).

To recapitulate: One might wonder if the anatomy of religious belief is being revealed in the varying Gospels' accounts of the centurion.  In Mark, the centurion witnesses Jesus' death first-hand and in close proximity.  We do not know what about Jesus' death might have been observed at such close quarters, and might have been observed in no other way.  It is only our conceit that could induce us to say that all the centurion saw was a man dying, and dying in a rather abbreviated way for a victim of crucifixion.

We do not know what the centurion saw, just as we do not know what was seen by the Good Thief of "remember me when you come into your kingdom" fame.  The story in Mark says that, in observing Jesus' death at close hand, the centurion concluded that Jesus was "the Son of God."

The story in Luke is somewhat more withdrawn, and comports more with what the centurion, or anyone else, might be expected to say at such a distance: "Now when the centurion saw what was done, he glorified God, saying, Certainly this was a righteous man."  No longer in a position to observe Jesus' death close-up (and as the ensuing moments were building up) the centurion--it is reasonable to surmise--fell back on the more general and defensible tack: that Jesus died a remarkable death, a death that memorialized Jesus' innocence and heroic acceptance of his fate.

Only later--as described in Matthew, do we see the coalescing of religious belief in the communal and mutually-reinforcing recollections of a group:

"Now when the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus, saw the earthquake, and those things that were done, they feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God" (Matthew 27:54).

If there is a puzzle in the varying Synoptic Gospel accounts of the centurion's words, it is no more daunting than the puzzle that lies behind anyone's religious belief.  We believe in a God who is good, and we take the existence of goodness as evidence of the existence of godliness, and proceed apace to pronounce on the existence of God.

I Am What God Sees in Me

I am what God sees in me--because his eye paints as well as perceives.  We live in the eye of God.  We live in the imaging of God.

Sight is blindness.  Sight is blindness as assuredly as the negative space surrounding and making intelligible an object of interest is so much space of ignorance and unseen potentiality.  We see because we do not see--we see because we choose what information we will extract from our surroundings.  We do not see what surrounds the object we are looking at, and so we cannot claim to comprehend the picture.

That is what bedevils us.  We cannot know all, and so we seek--if knowing a greater part of the all is important to us--to cobble together a mosaic of contiguous images.  It can never be known, however, if our accumulated knowledge forms such a mosaic, or if our predispositions merely reinforce each other--though with slight differences with each picture.  It is as though our repeated attempts to tap together a mosaic of ostensibly greater and greater information might result only in a scenario--for illustration--in which we might attempt to impart more and more information to a coin by striking it repeatedly with the die--only to have its information value degraded by mis-hits and slightly varying impressions.

God is not blind, neither does he see the way we do--either physically or intellectually.  We diminish ourselves with every decision we make about what will receive our attention.  It is not so with God.  God sees things into being.