To Do with the Previous Post

The Earth at the Center of the Universe
Pearson Scott Foresman, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Or, at least sort of.  The previous post deals with our ideas of what our universe might consist.

Picture: The Ptolemaic System.  Page.  File.

To Do with the Idea of God

A certain difficulty I have with the notion of “materialism” is the question of whether an existence defined as consisting of neither more nor less than matter (and its convertible counterpart, energy) is to be understood as an existence of a certain type (“a material world would be such-and-such”) or as an existence of a—the “only”—type known to us (“our observable world composed of matter is all we can contend to exist”).

It would seem that designating our “world” as “material only” and as an observable manifestation of more largely-described “material” existence would presume that there is a “type” of world called “material”—presupposing the existence of an idealized “materialism” that would be revealed as presumptuous by its very premises.  We can observe our world and declare it to be merely a material phenomenon, but it is confined thereby by its “type” to a “type category” of one—itself.  Admittedly, nothing in the observation of our universe as purely material precludes the existence of universes described otherwise—though the strict materialist would be possessed of no means to test the existence of other universes, and moreover possessed, it would seem, of no reason to pursue such speculation.

So, materialism must describe our one and only universe—our materialist universe is simply what a materialist universe is (not what a materialist universe is “like,” but merely what a materialist universe “is.”)  And so, inescapably, material existence probed by any tools available to the materialist is an existence relating the idea of “God”—as well as any other idea ever held, or that will ever be held.  An “idea” can be described as merely a materially-related and materially-contemplated phenomenon of the interactions of particles, but an “idea” so described is an immortal thing—an “idea” that is a momentary (or life-long or civilization-long) overt psychological phenomenon will leave its imprint on the ensuing cause-and-effect permutations of anything it touches (either directly or through force-interactions.)  Nothing that lives (though “life” be a rather circumscribed thing for a materialist) ever—by the implications of materialism—truly dies.  Neither is any idea held by a living being a thing that truly dies.

The only way, in the materialist sense, that an idea might ever be extinguished is if every trace of its physical existence were to be lost—a conceptual impossibility, if each particle (or its even-smaller parts, or the energy expended in its material dissolution) impacts—in an albeit miniscule fashion—the whole.  A (materially-described) idea is intrinsic to the material world it inhabits.  Of course, it might be contended that an idea is “lost” if it is not translated in recognizable form to ensuing creatures, or it is dissipated in matter-energy interactions that cannot possibly be collected and/or interpreted by creatures as yet undiscovered, but all such scenarios of ideas being lost are conjectural—and thereby inimical to a strict materialist philosophy.  If ideas exist, they exist forever—barring some “faith-founded” certainty that the case is otherwise.

Moreover, if this is the one and only material existence—that is, if a “materialist” does not consider our existence as being within a belief-system of potentially infinite other “universe-lives” or “universe-case-studies,” then this one and only material universe, playing out in purely material terms, has been possessed from its beginning (or from its un-beginning beginning) of the material precursors of all ideas—such “precursors” in the strict materialist sense being indistinguishable from the ideas themselves.

The “God-idea” has always existed, exists now, and will always exist.  The question is what, if anything, we as creatures will do with it.

aaalkTo Give a Picture

Neo-Assyrian soldiers forming a phalanx
from Wikimedia Commons

 I suppose I should put the link here.

Each Passing Moment

In Genesis God says to humanity,” Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth . . . .”  God does not, however,  prescribe any minimum number or schedule of procreative events.  Humanity (or, as more reflective of the social reality, “man”kind) was presumed to possess an innate drive for sexual union.  Of course, given the totality of humanity’s history, the above would seem to be something of an understatement.

This notion of an “innate drive” (which we have no more cause to write off as unchosen by us than we have cause to write off an evil nature itself as being unchosen by us) is an important underpinning to a teaching of Jesus in Matthew:

“Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you. That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”

And it need scarcely be said, that “looking” at a memory or even a fancied image of another person with lust is the same as “looking” in real time.  There are, however, two important lessons to be taken from this teaching of Jesus.  The first should “need scarcely be said,” yet sadly it is: this “lust” business is essentially pervasive in sexually mature humans.  We creatures born to “be fruitful and multiply” are just as the Genesis initiation would presume—wrapped up in the whole business of “lust.”

While individual differences in sex drive, and the imposition of daily cares or untypical stresses, and the advancing of old age, can all serve to temper the sex-driven logic of Genesis, yet the logic is ever-present in scripture: sex (as sometimes distinct from particular “sexual duties”) is the logic of mature human physicality.  Contentions about this or that person’s chaste purity of thought life are as likely to be false as to be real.

This leads to the second lesson inherent in the “looketh on a woman to lust after her” passage.  “Adultery” is about faithlessness to a relationship—with all that the relationship entails.  Making adultery about faithfulness merely to intimacy is a fool’s errand, especially since (for example) a man’s wife can become for him as much as a dehumanized image (a “lusted after” woman) as any other fancy he might have for another, real or imagined.

And so adultery—along with its vanquishing—hinges on the responsible individual responding to innumerable instances in life which present choices and challenges.  Every duty to one’s spouse is important, and the fact of everyone—let’s face it—being lacking in perfect discipline of mind does not make every marriage an example of adultery, either vitiated overall or doomed to an endless cycle of apology and reconciliation.  It simply means that all marriages have moments of adultery, and moments of fealty, and moments of intimacy, and moments of alienation.  The healthy and halting progression of moments is what leads to an improved relationship.

Of course, it must be obvious that I am emphasizing this blog’s insistence on “moments.”  Often “moments” chiefly understood in their relative isolation can be incomparably preferable to “story-arcs” of human behavior, “story-arcs” that twist together and twist together again moments of impulsive behavior with extended episodes of behavior in which we try to make stories of justification or rationalization for what we have done and what we feel bound to do.  If only we could learn to say to ourselves, “Stop!  One thing does not necessarily lead to another!”

In regard to Jesus’ teaching about adultery, the “man” in question is presented with some salient facts.  He has lusted, and he has been thereby unfaithful to his relationship, and he cannot wish away what he has just thought, and he cannot pretend that he is to be spared the lot of lustful mankind, and he cannot make that lot an excuse for his behavior—and so on and on.  Just that one moment of evil thought is enough to make a lifetime of sorting-out for the man—if he could really spare a lifetime to sort it out.  Of course, life must go on, and a man who is taught—and who teaches himself—to let such moments rest as burning—and, fear not, dissipating—lessons within himself can go on with life.  Life will bring other moments enough, and we will never have time to come to conscious resolution of all the moments we regret.

Or we can make of our life “story-arcs,” doing this or that because of what we have already done.  This tragic tendency is amply illustrated in the story of what is rather revealingly known as David’s “great sin.”  David commits adultery with Bathsheba and has Bathsheba’s noble husband, Uriah, killed.  (David also does other things, like taking an illicit census and getting seventy thousand people killed thereby, but, you know, whatever.)  The sordid Bathsheba episode is what has captured the attention of history.

Of course, the emphases of history change over time, and of late it has been fashionable (and none too soon) to wonder if simple “adultery” between David and Bathsheba is truly what happened.  Surely David was guilty as an adulterer, but did Bathsheba really have a choice?  In a parallel vein, however, a revisionist view of the “David and Bathsheba” story might profit from applying the “moment-by-moment” approach of this blog.  David committed an evil act with the physical adultery (to say nothing of the conceptual adultery that preceded it), but once he had committed himself to the “story-arc” of his behavior, he made himself unavailable to the warnings that each passing moment might bring.

David took Bathsheba, and David had Uriah killed, and that is what the story (or our lore of the story) remembers.  But David in the process “linked-in” a moment that, in itself, ought to have given him pause indeed.  This was the David whose great early years were spent in the company of his soldiers (company that Uriah insists on sharing vicariously even surrounded by the comforts of Jerusalem), yet David orders Joab not simply to kill Uriah, but also to engineer the noble soldier’s death in the field.  Uriah did not die by himself—David’s evil stratagem through Joab brought about not merely Uriah’s death, but also the deaths of men in Uriah’s company—men scarcely remembered today, and yet who were memorialized in Second Samuel as “some of the people of the servants of David”—one of the saddest phrases in all the Old Testament.

As I wrote above, the grinding and horrid logic of the David and Bathsheba story is that David made himself unavailable to the warnings that each passing moment might bring.  That is a lesson that can help us understand Jesus’ wrenching warnings about lust and adultery.

My First Image

Ficus Carica--Seems like a good start.
From public domain Encyclopedia Britannica, via Wikimedia Commons

I'm just trying to get used to using images.  I'm trying to do everything I can (and everything I can learn) to manage copyrights properly.

A More Fitting Profile

I crouch under the beams of the doorway.

What matters to me is the potentiality of each moment—how, for example, the preceding metaphor derived from the Bible and applicable to numerous permutations and interpretations cannot change the fact that we exist always in the moment.

I crouch under the beams of the doorway—I can never stay in such a posture, and I can never experience a moment that does not, on is own terms, demand such a stance.

Both Aspects of Good

One of the most pernicious aspects of our thought-lives is the idea of balance—the expectation that this or that element ought to have a corresponding opposing element.  Unsurprisingly, this leads to difficulties in the realm of religion, where mundane pairings like light and dark, past and future, alien and familiar, and the like, run up against much more troubling pairings—most famously, good and evil.

We see good as the counterpoint to evil, and yet the very idea of a latent “balance” is of course troubling to us.  Good must be greater than evil.  (And evil must be cast into an intellectual realm in which—contrary to our most “logical” tendencies—evil must be thought somehow separate from the creative will of God, and yet evil could not create itself, and so on.)  It must be asked first and foremost if the dualistic concept of counterbalancing opposites is not an imposition of us onto our conceptions of existence, rather than a necessary concept.

It might be asked, for example, how life can be the opposite of death.  Life experiences death, but death does not experience life.  Death does not come to life, yet life comes to death.  Inescapably, “death” as an object of consideration occurs only to that which is living, while yet it is only the living that also experiences “life” as an object of consideration.

Or to put it in a more general way (as I believe philosophers have done, more artfully than I), that which exists can both exist and be understood as no longer existing, but that which does not exist cannot in counterbalance be thought to intrude into the realm of existence.  Or something like that—I find it all rather confusing.

What ought not to be confusing is the way in which we must cede to God the ability to make things exist or not at will.  Genesis describes God as speaking Creation into existence and then calling Creation “good.”  Creation is less than God, and therefore by necessity uncategorizable as possessing the full range of divine perfections.  Creation is “good,” but it is not “perfect,” and therefore Creation could be called “not good” by God, if he so willed.

What might be stated just as bluntly, however, is that God could will out of existence any or all of the “not goodness” of Creation.  He is God, after all.  This is probably behind the great irony of the “Fall” episode.  Adam and Eve are raised above the animals in “knowing” good and evil—though the “above” part is ironic in itself, since arguably animals know good and evil in terms of what to approach and what to avoid—Adam and Eve simply acquired the chance to be philosophical, judgmental, unforgiving, and wrong in their notions of what to approach and what to avoid.

Moreover, it is only in a partial sense that humanity “knowing good and evil” makes humanity “like God,” in that humanity is in no way promised thereby God’s sovereign prerogative to will the good or evil of this or that out of existence.  To put it another way, the God that can “know” (as much as “will” or “speak” or any other presumptuous verb thrust by us onto him) anything into existence can also “know” that thing into a greater or lesser moral state.

The most intellectually volatile aspect of any concept of dualism must be the inherent tension between dualism and the sovereignty of the Creator God.  If God creates something, it is the prerogative of God to create a separate counterbalance to that something, or to create that something with an internalized dynamic of such dualism.

This concept runs strikingly through the introduction to John.  At first it begins with a primordial creation-story (which, like the primordial creation-story in Genesis, is not a story at all, but rather a narratively-framed presentation of a set of conditions):

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  The same was in the beginning with God.  All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”

There is in the above passage no hint of how a course of events therein might be understood, nor any hint that such analysis would be of any profit.  The above passage leads to the next, pivotal statement:

“In him was life; and the life was the light of men.”

As I said, the primordial creation-story admits of no logical analysis, so there is no warrant to imagine that the “life” here described is “biological” in the strict sense, nor even restricted to a “life” in Jesus understood directly as a provision for humanity.  Jesus acts like fig-trees and mountains are alive—it would be an act of gross presumption to insist on overturning the insistent implication of a Creation made by and with the living Son of God—a Creation as an incomprehensible living totality.

The important point for the present analysis is to see the above passage as linked to the next, so:

“In him was life; and the life was the light of men.  And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended [that is, overpowered] it not.”

We must be reminded here of the analogous passage in Genesis:

“And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”

If the light was not divided from the darkness at first, then it permeated all.  To divide the light from the darkness was to draw out from it darkness—something that we cannot understand, yet the implication from what little we can understand is that “light” includes both light and dark, just as the “life” understood as pre-existing the light includes within itself both life and death.  The sovereign creative power of God that brings dualisms into existence simultaneously reins them in.

If this principle is understood and applied properly, then the rest of the introduction to John falls into place in our comprehension.

“There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.”  This, of course, is the John who said he was not Elijah, while Jesus said he was indeed Elijah.  There ought to be nothing really strange in this.  The “John Chapter One” life in Jesus is life, and it is also (in our ken) not-life.  The light is light, and it is also not-light.  John the Baptist is Elijah, and he is also not-Elijah.

After a brief description of the Baptist as a witness of the Light, we have:

“That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.  He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.”

To apply the straightforward analysis of which we imagine ourselves capable (and which we usually presume to be appropriate), we would have to conclude that the preceding passage is simply untrue.  The gospels are full of descriptions of “the world” in any number of terms (storms, plants, fish, children, crowds, prospective disciples, prophets, dead people, maladies, even—if you will—demons) in which Jesus is indeed recognized in such vein as is appropriate to the son and equal of the Creator God.  To use the analysis I have proposed above, there is no such difficulty, because Jesus possesses indeed both totalities of the dualism.  Jesus is the recognized and the not-recognized.

The Introduction continues:

“He came unto his own, and his own received him not.  But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”

The “unto his own” part seems curiously circumspect, if we are to take it simply as a reference to “the Jews” or to “Judaism.”  This is the same gospel that has “the chief priests of the Jews” say to Pilate, “Write not, The King of the Jews . . . ,” so we can probably surmise that the “unto his own” part is not meant out of delicacy.  We would do well to note that further on in the Introduction there is:

“For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.”

In the same framework of circumspection as the “unto his own” part, we can analyze the “law given by Moses” part as potentially more comprehensive than the idea of “the Jewish Law.”  The notion of the written law as in part a manifestation of a greater “law of the heart” or some such was not unknown in Jesus’ day (see Paul in Romans.)  Moreover, “unto his own” was potentially a malleable term, applicable in the most restrictive way to a “Judaism” that really did reflect the majority heritage of Judah as against the more diminished tribes, and the pivotal ancestor was now Jacob (Israel), and then again now Abraham.

So we have Jesus who was a Jew, and Jesus who was a not-Jew, much as we have (by his own puzzling query) Jesus who was Son of David and not-Son-of-David.  Much of this latter observation is of little consequence to an analysis of Jesus’ ministry, just as trying to figure out the primordial creation-stories might also be of little consequence (or little profit.)  There is, however, no warrant for perfunctorily turning over and casting aside persisting questions about dualism (which of course involve far more than the discussion here.)  Endless publications address the issue of “Why God Permits Evil.”

We might also, in a more comprehensive vein, draw up lists of questions about Why God Permits Unsolvable Questions to Exist.  We have gotten to the end of the Introduction to John, and just such a question arises (particularly since we are considering the Patriarchs):

“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”

It is the “at any time” part that lingers—one of the chief commonalities of the patriarchs and notables of ancient Israel is the phenomenon of (admittedly fleeting or partial or “typological”) glimpses of God.  Here in John the gap and the distinction between God and his Creation are emphasized, and we would do well to maintain a respectful distance.  I contend, however, that considerations such as those about “dualisms” and “the sovereignty of God” in the midst of this discussion are of great importance.

We do not understand dualisms in Creation because we were not witnesses of Creation, nor is it really the case that Genesis or the other scriptures describe the act of creation.  What falls to us in description since the creation of Adam is what falls away from an original state (or divinely-intended original state) that we can barely begin to imagine.  The idea that the original and ongoing creative acts of God can be understood as dualisms translatable into our understandings of science or even of everyday experiences must always be suspect—not least because none of that helps The Problem of Evil.  It is probably no surprise that I will put forth the idea that good and evil are not a duality—that instead they are both aspects of good, much as life and death are both aspects of life.

What I consider most important, however, is that a lively approach to such questions can help us remember just how frustratingly primordial must be any of our attempts to understand our plight.  Our origins as a collective people cannot be understood as a God-designed plan for humanity and its institutions that was thrown off-course by the Fall.  God designed Creation for Adam (and potentially others) to thrive in unfettered communion with God.  The whole “society” thing is a reparative process, not a pristine plan.  That much is made plain in Genesis, if we are willing to read it without presuppositions.

With the Gospel of John and the “No man hath seen God at any time” passage in mind, we must do better than simply believe that no man hath seen God (while struggling with Scripture passages that seem to say the opposite.)  “No man hath seen God” is an attitude of reverence, and it is not well-served by contentions about the character of God that cannot stand unsparing analysis.  Neither have we any warrant to draw up pictures of God that consist of characterizations of him setting us this or that institution when we have good reason to suspect that they were not his “original plan.”

This reverential attitude can also have great practical applications.  A certain sophomoric type of American political analysis harps on the idea (of value in itself) that government is at best a “necessary evil,” and both a conservative Christian view of man as depraved and a good Fourth-of-July dose of Israel being chastised for wanting a king can be drawn up in support.  The problem with this analysis is that it is often yoked to the idea that “the family” was God’s original plan, and that government intrusion (or fancied government intrusion) upon the family (read: patriarchal family) is to be avoided at all costs.  Of course, the history of anti-governmental “family-based” communities provide the conscientious observer no lack of examples of why both family and government are necessary, and are both often evil.

I will not pretend to be unaware, however, how conventional—and scripturally comfortable—analyses of my views will hold me in suspicion.  It makes my head swim, indeed, to read what I just wrote: Good and evil are not a duality—instead they are both aspects of good, much as life and death are both aspects of life.

Atheism Has Orientations

In certain quarters of organized atheism—I must admit that even the much-heralded “New Atheism” of the last couple of decades is something I know little about—there is abroad the question of whether atheism is associated intrinsically with this or that activism, or at least with this or that approach to life.

My interest in atheism has been chiefly about how—or whether—atheism occupies similar space in human experience with religion (or perhaps I should say, with “theism.”)  I would say that the very process of comparing atheism with religion will shed light on the question of whether or not atheism is associated with activism.

Atheism, of course, will have to be defined if analyzing it is going to get anywhere.  I will presume that the flat-out notion of being certain of the non-existence of God (let’s face it, the standard monotheism language is the shorthand current in the argument) is a certainty that will collapse under its own weight—only a type of “religion-like” ideology will declare the non-existence of that which by definition is independent of the criteria by which we ascertain “existence.”

Neither, however, can we presume to analyze an “atheism” that is functionally indistinguishable from “agnosticism.”  The agnostic’s “I don’t know if God exists” cannot really be differentiated from a type of “atheistic” statement that might go: “There is no way we can ever know if God exists.”  In the latter case the speaker’s expression of the (agnostic) inability to believe is simply melded to the certainty I described above, a certainty about the non-existence of something simply because evidence is unavailable to us.  It is no more or less “religious” to declare that we can never know if God exists than it would be to declare that God cannot exist.

I would contend, however, that there are at least two manifestations of atheism that escape being tangled up necessarily in the above considerations.  One such manifestation would be a contention that believing in God and/or entertaining such modes of thought that might allow for believing in God would be a bad thing.  Such an “atheism” is unencumbered by a self-proclaimed conceit of intellectual perfection, being an “atheism” that presents itself as the lesser of two evils—unbelief preferred to belief.  Saying that believing in God is a bad thing, however, effectively concedes the argument I started with (whether or not atheism is intrinsically activist) and we will revisit “belief as bad thing” in a moment.

Another such manifestation of atheism that escapes “being tangled up necessarily in the above considerations” can be an atheism that is understood by, and in particularly-arising contexts described by, its holder as being simply a personal orientation.  A person can, presumably, simply believe that God does not exist.  Without a corresponding contention on the part of the (non)believer, however, that such a view should be held by others, such “atheism” is idiosyncratic and does not admit to analysis as a philosophical position—much less might it contribute (for good or ill) to the issue of whether atheism is necessarily activist.

An idiosyncratic theist might be comparable to an idiosyncratic atheist, save for one thing.  To believe in God is to entertain the notion that interaction between the believer and God—on some plane, in some form—is a necessarily-existing possibility.  To not believe in God, however, can be indistinguishable from avoiding the matter altogether.  We are reminded of this phenomenon often enough, when contentions (often striking in their absurdity and repugnance) are raised to the effect that simply going about with the business of secular government is effectively atheistic.

But what is to be made of the possibility that a person might simply rule out (or perhaps have always been without) the notion of God?  Does that person differ on the activist-nonactivist scale from a person who simply chooses to put aside considerations of religion?  Granted, in many applications a religious person might put aside particular faith considerations and behave in a thoroughly secular vein—but a “religious” person who never acted on his or her faith would be invisible to the “activist” issue (as well as vulnerable in many quarters to sectarian criticisms that we are privileged to ignore.)

Not believing something can be as much a nothing as not doing something.  And not thinking about something can be as much a nothing as not believing something.  Wrapped up in all the possibilities of the “nothings” we can make out of much of our lives is a universe of possibilities—among them ignoring the question of God, denying the existence of God, and believing in God and leaving it at that.  The believer, however, is “supposed” to do this or that, not to do nothing.  And as for the atheist?

For purposes of the argument I presented at the outset, activism is part and parcel of atheism—that is the only way that we can consider the matter intelligibly.  Whether by measure great or small, atheism appears in our communal sphere of time and space only insofar as its adherents and organizations move through time and space—coming from somewhere and going somewhere.  Of course, this same reality of “coming from somewhere and going somewhere” attends religion as well, and the grimmer aspects of people coming from their own personal backgrounds are well known to atheists, who have to contend (surprise, surprise) often enough with families and communities that—in defiance of raw statistical possibilities—have somehow nearly all fallen on the same metaphysical “truths.”

As I mentioned before (and promised to revisit) a possible manifestation of atheism would be a contention that believing in God and/or entertaining such modes of thought that might allow for believing in God would be a bad thing.  Such is the brand of atheism ripest for activism, for it sees itself on a mission.  It is also the brand of atheism most immune to particularistic philosophical heckling, since it is tied most closely not to the question of God’s existence, but rather to the question of the possible insidious nature of religious belief.  It is not alone in its portion of bile, and it is vigorously countered by a type of religiosity that sees the denial of good in the denial of God.

Neither is atheism distinct from religion when the question of the unsurprising origin of unseemly attendant beliefs is considered.  Atheism is often considered (in some conceits) to be the realm of the intellectually gifted; atheism is often considered to be the fruits of effort to overcome the limitations that hold down lesser persons; atheism is often considered to be the rightful province of historically Western liberal and rational thought-realms.  It is no wonder that the most striking aspect of organized activism arising in the New Atheism has been patriarchal libertarianism.

Atheism, like religion, is coming from somewhere, and it is going somewhere.  Or perhaps we might account for a degree of variation in each thought-school, and say that each is coming from a range of somewheres, and going to a range of somewheres.  The importance of the “activism” issue lies in our remembering that people do things (like accepting or rejecting thoughts) for reasons.  “Activism,” be it ever so humble, is intrinsic to belief (and unbelief), and the study of tendencies to activism is an invaluable counter-balance to one of the most truly insidious tendencies of thought-schools: the contention that this or that consideration of belief is beyond question because it is common to the “true” nature of human beings.

Social Dysfunction Goes Back to the Start

An example of reasoning based on a mistaken view of humanity’s original state, from:

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/thechristianworldreview/2023/02/what-is-sin/

Nobody Understands Sin, by David Guill, February 26, 2023

“. . . Aquinas claimed that God created the world to function in a certain way and in accordance to certain principles. These principles are understood intuitively and can be further explored using our God-given ability to reason.

“A quick example could be our need for companionship. We are social creatures designed to live in large or small communities. From that starting point, we can logically conclude that murder and theft are wrong. After all, those actions inhibit our ability to live in social groups.”

This is incorrect.  Humanity was not designed as a collection of social creatures, or as individuals meant to be social creatures.  Humanity was meant to be in communion with God—the perfect Other—and in light of the incomprehensible otherness of God can be found no simple application of a “social”  relationship.

What was offered to Adam is difficult—perhaps impossible—for us to understand.  What we can understand, however, is the moral importance of reckoning our present status as “social creatures” to be problematic, not merely in our failed fulfillment of our obligations, but also in our latent tendencies to minimize our obligations overall.  To maintain, as Guill does, that we are “designed to live in large or small communities” is to give the game away, since the concepts of exclusion and alienation are implicit in the very concept of “community.”

From the “starting point” of our “need for companionship,” Guill says, “we can logically conclude that murder and theft are wrong.”  As though we humans did not routinely slaughter in our “tribal” (read: corollary of “community”) enterprises, and as though we humans did not routinely expropriate goods and services in innumerable schemes of ownership and privilege.  We call certain types of killing “murder,” because we are going to approve other types of killing.  We call certain types of appropriation “theft” because we are going to approve others—such approval, of course, being ratified for us by the communal structures in which we live.

If it is a matter of sorting out how to deal with our social entanglements (which God would have, apparently, spared Adam had Adam not displayed the need to not “be alone”), we must note that Jesus does not provide what we would conventionally call “help.”  Inflicting harsh behavior on a brother or sister would be called by Jesus “killing,” and Jesus solves any questions about ownership by requiring us to give everything away, either on our own initiative or at the request of those who would beg or borrow.  Good luck forging a communal order on those principles.

We were never meant, however, to live in communal order.  Adam was given Eve because he could not find community with the animals, and prior to that he was given the animals because he could not find community among the creations of Eden.  At this point—proceeding backward in the narrative—our access to explicit descriptions of Adam’s state fall away.  He was created by God.  No mortal can say why Adam would have not been created perfect, or would not have stayed perfect.  For us to wait until the “Fall” to pounce on some notion of “why” humanity is imperfect is just a craven game—as though the “rule” of a perfect God being expected to author perfect creations is at the “Fall” inexplicably lifted.

If there is any true application of the idea of humans as “social creatures,” then that application must be truly unyielding.  Our “society” as ordained by God must include all humans, and all creatures (offered, presumably, in good faith by God as suitable companions for us), and—in a progression of inescapable logic—all of the universe.  At this point of analysis, of course, we can realize that describing ourselves as rightly being “social creatures designed to live in large or small communities” has been rendered all but meaningless.

We were meant to be in society (for lack of a better word) with God.  We were never meant to forget that, and we were never meant to reckon that our moral requirements are any less than universal.

The Wheel of Experience

I have been thinking lately about the concept of “paradox” in Jesus’ teachings.  Of course, there are few things commentators like better than to pronounce upon this or that as being some divinely-ordained “paradox.”  Often this seems to be linked to Paul writing about “foolishness,” or “weakness,” or some such.

It is, however, usually insipid to seize upon this or that aspect of Jesus’ ministry as being “paradoxical.”  Jesus’ ministry is delivered to us as we stand on the quintessential, foundational paradox—we are going to die (as we believe), yet we cannot for a moment conceptualize anything but the continuance of our experiences of life, and (ridiculous as this may sound) we actually have no reason for absolute assurance in the inevitability of our death.  Somebody of the ancient Greeks opined that death is the only cause for our indulgence of philosophy—if we did not face a self-acknowledged certainty of death (or of the possibility of death) we would not concern ourselves about such transcendent matters.

So we are convinced that we are going to die, and we prepare for it.  Or we come up with some philosophy (or cultivated predispositions of thought, though perhaps not deserving so refined a term as “philosophy”) that we use to avoid or forestall our contemplation of death.  In any event, the prospect of death constitutes the initial proposition of our metaphysical thought-lives—we “believe” in it.  Death is the first (or at least initially-appearing) god in our pantheon.  Even a child given a beginning in religion has not been given a lesson of substance unless he or she has been informed of the possibility of punishment (as close to the concept of death that the child can imagine) at the hands of the deity.  Until the notion of punishment has been introduced, any “god” that the young child hears about is no more than an invisible sky-uncle, believed in or not (or alternately believed in or not) at the merest whim.

We can be told stories or histories about a time before our individual selves, and we can understand that our experiences began around the time of our birth, but such understanding is not “true,”—it is believed to be true.  What is “true” is that we have never lived in an existence other than that which we remember—all else is conjectural.  All purportedly before that is conjectural.  What is “true” is that our experience of our experience-realm being continual and necessary for any existence we might have makes it impossible for us to consider a time when we might not exist.  We will always “live,” yet we resign ourselves to dying.  We “believe” in dying, in death.  Death is our first god.

The teachings of Jesus, of course, take as unquestioned the existence of a reality beyond the experiences of his listener.  Most crucially, however, the teachings of Jesus do not presuppose in the listener an ability to survey the full scope of time and existence.  There was a time before humanity, but that is not the same as to say that humanity exists on some segmented part of an understandable time-scale.  God created man in some certain way, and then the character of man was understood by God as unsuited to the original—as we believe—intent of God for untrammeled communion with man.  Man comes to be described in the narrative as needing other things.  “Man” as an element of the universe changes over time, culminating most notably in the experience of the first couple in the “Fall,” though it must be reckoned that the character of humanity is described as changing even further along in the Genesis narrative.

The upshot of all of this is the fact that our theology cannot plot events over a comprehensive time-scale.  Indeed, the idea of “time” as something that we can understand is as ludicrous as “death” as something we can understand.  We in our flailings-about to understand our existence rapidly and persistently deify both time and death.  In our attempts to understand (or to prime ourselves to be “awed by”) God—the God who exists always and everywhere—we make ourselves ridiculous in imagining we can understand time and space.

The foundational paradox of our relationship to the teachings of Jesus is the fact that the very premise of our attempts to understand is a premise of limited time and space.  Our lives pass on a scale that is foreign to our “understanding” of the timelessness of God, and our lives occur on a scale of dimensions that only in our conceit can we grasp as linear infinities.  Really our lives occur in the fleeting balls of balled-up experiences that each of us possesses.

Our relationship to God is experiential—yet we must acknowledge God as transcending all experience, and we must ask God to grant us experiences that must exist on planes that we cannot begin to imagine.  We are not asking for more and better, we are asking for we know not what.  Even a notion that we are asking for a state reminiscent of Adam’s original relationship with God is predicated—if Genesis as an origin-story is taken seriously—on our being granted a set of characteristics inherent in God’s original design for man—a design not described in the narrative of Genesis, which has the story of Adam begin narratively not with a perfect original state, but with the quandary of Adam needing other people.

So the whole idea of “paradox” in the teachings of Jesus is itself paradoxical.  Everything in the teachings of Jesus can be seen to cancel out some other element of the teachings of Jesus.  (How often do we hear, “But Jesus also said . . . .”)  Ultimately, however (“ultimately” being a paradoxical term here) the teachings of Jesus are meant to be applied to our experiences—and in the realm of our experiences—and our experience-states change.  Our experiences cancel each other out.  In the rushing, overlapping cycles of “rousing, readying, and reaping,” we are dipped as though on a wheel into experience-states for which in their particulars Jesus’ teachings are suited.

Claiming Sonship Denying Father Same

Claiming Sonship and Denying the Father Are the Same Thing—One and the Same

Claiming Sonship and Denying the Father Are the Same Thing

Claiming sonship and denying the Father are the same thing.

Hunter Gatherers of Men

In the Bible’s account of the murder of Abel, a man—to whom was ascribed no wrongdoing—was killed by his brother.  In the New Testament account of the murder of John the Baptist, the victim was attainted with no wrongdoing—and he was killed by a man (“Herod the tetrarch”) who purported to adhere to the same moral code as John.

In each instance, the chief detectable source (one might say “well-spring”) of the animosity of the murderer toward his victim was the fact that the victim’s very comportment served as a reminder of the latent murderer’s failings.  Abel did Cain no wrong, and John did Herod no wrong.  Indeed, Abel and John were merely doing their duties.

It would be presumptuous, however, to claim that Abel or John exhibited extraordinary virtues.  Indeed, there is no cause to assume that those murdered unfortunates could say anything other than (as Jesus might phrase it), “We are but miserable servants.  We have only done our duty.”  Abel and John are hailed as prophets, but it is their highlighting of wrongdoing (no small matter, to be sure) that distinguishes them.

The function of those prophets was to make plain the demands of God.  John’s career, especially, shows the “proclaiming” aspect of the prophets in high relief.  Famously, the Old Testament ends with the promise from the Book of Malachi:

“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.”

Equally famously, the gospels wrestle with the notion of the fulfillment of this prophecy in John the Baptist, who answered thus about himself:

“And they asked him, What then?  Art thou Elias?  And he saith, I am not.”

Yet Jesus says of John:

“For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John, And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.  He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”

The whole notion of the return of Elijah—even of the function of the prophets themselves—is bound up with the experiential aspect of the urgency of God’s commands.  “Experiential” is the key—nothing, for example, about the career of John hinges on whether or not he saw himself as a prophet.  The “prophetic message” is a thing unto itself, not an aspect of a “job description” of a “prophet.”

There is more, however, in the commonalities between Abel and John the Baptist that illustrate the undertakings (and hardships and demands) of the prophetic function.  First, and perhaps most importantly, is the experiential effect of prophecy in a sense of urgency.  Cain, while his sacrifice has not been accepted, is not told by God that he is damned.  God tells Cain that sin is crouched in waiting for him.  John tells the wicked of the Jews that holy wrath awaits them—and that nothing in their status as Abraham’s offspring will avail them in the judgment.  Only the urgency of repentance will save them.

A sense of urgency, however, does not comport well with a sense of being settled.  When Jesus sends the disciples out on their missions, he does not send them out to found churches (or proto-churches) or to appoint local leaders in the towns and villages.  Jesus sends the disciples out to course through the territories as catalysts of experience.  His description of their journey proceeds from the mundane to the apocalyptic.  One moment Jesus is talking about tunics and staffs, the next moment about persecution, the next moment about the impossibility of the disciples completing their mission, the next moment about the end of the age.

All of this folds back into the common human experiences of exhilarating or terrifying change versus the comfort and assurance of settlement.  Abel and John are not settling characters.  Abel especially is enigmatic.  Something about that man and his sacrifice was pleasing to God.  (And let us not entertain any unsubstantiated notions such as certain artists’ desire to portray Abel as a youth set upon by a full-grown elder brother.)  What about Abel’s offering distinguished it from Cain’s?  The commentators have been forced, after all, to note that the Law considered a bloodless sacrifice to be acceptable.  Surely Abel’s role as an animal-slaughterer was not what set him above his brother.

Of course, Abel’s role as an animal-slaughterer is puzzling in itself.  Unless Abel thought up the grisly business of eating his flock—and translated that concept to the God before whom he lay their carcasses and “the fat thereof”, with divine permission to eat animals still in the post-Flood future—it must be thought that God had instructed Abel in his offering, a detail hidden from us.  The commentators have exerted themselves to find some cause by which Abel’s offering was preferred to Cain’s (as though the two brothers might not have both earned sufficient—though differing—“passing grades.”  They were not, after all, in competition with each other.)

Much has been made of Abel offering “of the firstlings of the flock,” but the salient aspect of a sacrifice’s suitability (according to “the Law”) was that it be “without blemish”—an aspect that the Genesis account omits.  Are we to know that Cain’s second-day harvesting of “the fruit of the ground” did not contain the most perfect specimens?  Or that the initial season’s harvest of “the fruit of the ground” was not its “firstlings”?

Really, we have before us in the examples of Abel and John the Baptist two men dressed in the skins of animals (assuming, as seems reasonable, that Abel was attired similarly to his parents.  Here, at least, we might have cause to imagine Abel wearing something that did not die by itself, though we are still left with "the fat thereof” being mere refuse to a vegetarian Abel—scarcely the stuff of sacrifice.)  That is to say, we have Abel and John the Baptist dressed in the skins of mammals while eschewing a diet more sentient than locusts.

What we have before us is two men who have distanced themselves from the more enticing aspects of settled civilization.  I realize that I have worked myself around to one of the favorite themes of secular analysts about the Cain and Abel story—that it is the primordial memory of an ages-long struggle between pastoralists and planters.  What is not usually linked to this school of conjecture is any concerted analysis to the effect that, for the Bible, there is really nothing “primordial” about it.  The pastoralist is not contrasted merely with the planter, but also with the urban civilizations dependent on plant-agriculture.  Indeed, the Bible begins and ends with cities viewed as sinkholes of depravity—a theme that is blunted in its development by the emphasis—for good or ill—on the persistent notions of a righteous “City of David” or some vision of Jerusalem, or on the unsurprising choice of cities as the loci of primitive churches.

Yet we must remember that evil cities (Sodom and Gomorrah, Babylon, even the hapless towns of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum) are not just “bad apples” in the bin of urbanization.  The gathering of peoples is not the good, in the teachings of Jesus or in the scriptures to which he subscribes, that it is often imagined to be.  The tower of Babel is just the prime example.  Humanity was commanded to multiply and fill the earth, and yet people—so the account relates—wanted to make a great city and also to make a name for themselves.  The “name” part is particularly puzzling—either they saw themselves as inhabiting an earth also “peopled” by other non-human beings, or the “name” is simply a majoritarian voice of a segment of humanity wishing to secure for themselves the benefits of urbanization in distinction to fewer and lesser outlying peoples.  Neither notion, of course, would be deemed acceptable by the narrative.

Nothing about the singularity of the tower of Babel in the narrative precludes the notion that “Babel-ism” in itself defies God’s original decree.  Would one great city on each continent mean that humanity had multiplied and filled the earth?  Would a sprinkling of smaller “great cities” equal a “filling of the earth?”  And would any of this diminishment of size relate necessarily to the desire to—Babel-like—raise humanity with presumption in the face of God?  (“And thou, Capernaum, which are exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell.”)

And so, as I wrote above, we have Abel and John the Baptist dressed in the skins of mammals while eschewing a diet more sentient than locusts.  What is more, we have a logic of “mission” and of “prophetic ministry” in the teachings of Jesus that—in the all-important experiential sense—drives logically and inescapably toward the “sowing” of Jesus’ followers into the fields of the earth, rather than the “gathering” of his followers into churches.  The fact that Jesus will be present when “two or three” are gathered together in his name is a fact that draws its force from the underlying experiential premise of Jesus’ teachings.  For human beings to meet and interact fruitfully is always a rare occurrence—rare, that is, in comparison to the perpetual din of forced fellowship and of self-reinforcing convenience in thought and manners.

In the episode of Cain and Abel, the blood of the murdered brother might have cried out for vengeance, but the interaction of God and the murderer is not without hope.  God had warned Cain that evil is crouching for him, and God couched that warning—and the corollary of hope—in language that tells Cain that so much as the settled atmosphere of his tent-flap or doorway is a danger to him.  Even the “curse” of the ground refusing to submit to Cain’s tillage could be a blessing to him, as the deprivations of a wilderness life might bring him to repentance.  And Cain’s response?  To take God’s guarantee of personal protection with him as he goes off to build a city.  Inasmuch as the surrounding fields will refuse to grow for Cain personally, well, it does not take much to imagine the development of forced labor and of social stratification.

And then there is John the Baptist, immersing the repentant in the Jordan and sending them on their way.  Or dousing the hypocritical in scorn and sending them on their way.  Or splintering off disciples for Jesus.   And then there is Jesus, splintering and shattering society in virtually every way imaginable.

Family is nothing, until—when the prophetic Elijah-moment arises—it is everything.  Jesus’ mother dwells in the shadows of his life until he must draw her out of the shadows and place her in another’s care.

Friendship is nothing until—when the prophetic Elijah-moment arises—it is everything.  The disciples are sent off to minister to strangers and told not to even salute people on the road.  Then they are told that they must be ever ready to sacrifice their lives for their friends.

Marriage is nothing until—when the prophetic Elijah-moment arises—it is everything.  A spouse is (as is every other person) a source of attachment to the follower of Jesus that threatens ever to blunt the follower’s mission and concentration—until the question becomes the existential one of choosing life individually versus the welfare of the spouse.

Religion is nothing until—when the prophetic Elijah-moment arises—it is everything.  Religious obligation is indistinguishable from social or legal obligations (no matter how tenuous or obscure the relationships of obligation between those realms), until some overriding crisis.  One moment religious obligation is—to cite the example of Jesus’ time and locality—a question of obeying those who occupy Moses’ seat, and the next moment religious obligation is remembering that the earth is God’s footstool.

From the beginning of—and throughout—the story of the world told by Jesus, the emphasis has been on the scattering of his ministry by followers of his willing to trust themselves to the wind (to use Jesus’ John 3 metaphor) of what appears to us to be inscrutable fortune.  All of this is in distinction to the notions of the denominations, which by definition emphasize centrality of thought and the subsuming of real experience to whipped-up ideas about what religion should feel like.  The denominations must distinguish themselves by doctrine, which makes no sense unless what is thought proper to think and feel is contrasted to what is thought improper to think and feel.

In conventional Christianity, the field of mission is a field of hard ground that must be either tilled with hard implements or subjected in its fruits to hard examination—two notions that would not be pernicious in themselves, except that they are founded on the all-too-easy premise that following Jesus can be described in such definite sense as to be accessible and understandable independently of the momentary content of one’s experience-realm.  It cannot.  The guests cannot mourn while the bridegroom is present, the faithful cannot keep the Sabbath at the cost of others’ suffering, and the Messiah that must be David’s son cannot be David’s son—or can he?

Ultimately, the followers of Jesus—and the collective following of Jesus—cannot be afraid of splintering apart.  Denominations must emphasize centrality, and so the logic of going into the world must assume that few will respond to Jesus’ call.  Jesus, on the other hand, describes a harvest greater than may be gathered—what is lacking is workers willing to learn what they are teaching even as they are teaching it.

Jesus’ metaphor of the worker in the field is not the one who plants, but the one who gleans—the one who knows not where he or she comes from or is going.  God is the one who plants.  Jesus gave the first disciples a challenge indeed when he took them from their nets and made them “fishers of men.”  Translated to the land, Jesus made them—in shades of Abel and John—“hunter-gatherers of men.”