The Puzzle of Things

I asserted in my previous post that nothing possesses of necessity any substance comparable to that of God.  By “comparable,” I am not referring to a matter of degree, such as might be inherent in asserting that God is “incomparable” to any lesser or inferior thing.  “Comparable” in this context means exactly that: “possessing characteristics amenable to comparison.”  God is not like anything else.

“Anything else,” then, falls by necessity into a certain category: those things that are not God.  “Those things that are not God” share a certain characteristic: they are all created—they all constitute Creation.  Creation, then, is distinguished first and foremost by a commonality.  Creation is—in a manner existing before any subsequent specification—one thing.

This is not idle musing.  It matters—most specifically it matters in terms of Jesus’ teaching—that all Creation is one Creation.  Such division that exists in Creation—to the extent that any division is real—exists in either a perfect, absolute sense through the will of God, or it exists in some provisional sense through the will of creatures.

The initial division between God and Creation is hidden from us in Genesis.  “Creation” in Genesis is described as a generic premise (“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”) or it is described as the provision of a counterbalance to an existing phenomenon (“Let there be light” presumes the existence of a created phenomenon of “darkness”) or it involves a schematic approximation of evolution (“Let the earth bring forth . . . .”)  “Creation” as an act, much though we might speak of it, is kept from us in the unspoken mysteries of the dark and hidden.  “The heaven and the earth” are not “created” for us in a retrospective display through the narrative.  Similarly, the conceptions of creatures are native to the inconceivable inner realms.  Even the “re-birth” of Jesus—so crucial to the logic of his ministry and so precious to the denominations’ presentations of their ministries—happens in the hidden realms and is described retrospectively, Genesis-like, in the Gospels (much to the frustration of the denominations.)

We are left, then, with a Creation that simply exists and that exists in its simplest form as one thing.  “Things”—entities that are described separately—are so described because God says they are separate or because creatures (let us confine “creatures” in this instance to “humans”) say they are separate.

Jesus provides an observation that dietary restrictions are untenable because what is taken in subsequently passes out.  If his contention here is taken at face value, one must conclude that Jesus would make a poor dietician.  Some of what is ingested becomes, of course, part of the body.  Some of it never leaves.  Jesus, however, maintains that the body is a thing, and also that the diet is an altogether separate thing,  There is a reason for Jesus’ logically untenable pronouncement about diet—he is describing impurity, and he maintains that true impurity is a pollution of the heart—of the inner person—and he is unconcerned here about how persons might pollute their innards.

We must contrast Jesus’ view here with Paul’s contention in First Corinthians that sexual immorality is particularly heinous in that it involves what a person does inside his or her body.  The “inside” part might lead to a little vagueness about what in particular is being done, but the matter scarcely deserves much analysis.  Paul’s contention is not merely specious in its assertion about the dishonoring of the body—clumsily described as part of Christ’s body, as though the imagery can well stand such simplicity.  Indeed, it is bad enough that Paul will describe the use of the body in, say, premarital sex, as especially egregious—as though employing one’s limbs in torturing an innocent or gesturing troops to perform a massacre would be a significantly less evil endeavor.

No, the most disturbing aspect of Paul’s “inside the body” take on sexual sin is that it flies in the face of Jesus’ painstaking assertions about what real evil is.  Real evil is describable not in terms of the physical nature, but rather in terms of the inclinations of the heart.  In purely logical terms, of course, Paul is the more literally accurate.  Paul is right to declare that sexual activity can affect the body, and Jesus is incorrect in asserting that what is ingested simply passes out “in the draught.”  Jesus, however, is ultimately correct—and divinely correct—on both scores.  Sexual sin is wrong most importantly in that it dishonors the bond—the one-thing-ness—of a person’s legitimate relationship, and other sins (let us consider here drunkenness, gluttony, substance abuse) are wrong most importantly in that they dishonor the bond--the one-thing-ness--of our relationships to Creation and to the Creator.

At bottom, then, is the importance of understanding that a fundamental presumption of the fact of our existences is our individual existence as part of a whole—however tenuous or extensively broken that whole might be.  We might be tempted to see the roiling, boiling turmoil of the initially-described Creation as a phenomenon of disunity.  Yet who are we to think so?  God at that narratively-described moment was in the company of the host of heaven, and surely the mere physical phenomena of the wave-tossed deep will never be plumbed by us, and must involve endless mysteries of grandeur beyond our ken.  God may have had in mind further developments of his Creation, but who are we to say that either God or Creation was then lacking?

In my next post I will try to show how the puzzle of “things” (though all things are part of one “thing”) has bedeviled the heritage of humanity, and also how understanding this puzzle is intrinsic to understanding the ministry of Jesus.