Theology for the Masses

In this final installment on the “Abraham Alone” series, we will look at the ambiguity of Abrahamic religion’s relationship with Canaanite religion and culture. Nearly every text has something to say about this porous relationship that is strained by the wickedness of Canaanite culture in general, but at times quite intimate and righteous. So, the last feature of Abrahamic religion is that it was distinct from, but at times having commonality with Canaanite religion and culture.

Beginning with the distinctions,[1] whether or not Abrahamic religion was monotheistic it is obvious that Abraham follows only Yahweh. Additionally, the practice of circumcision on the eighth day after birth also separates Abraham from the Canaanites. Though ancient Semitic peoples practiced circumcision, this feature is unique to Abrahamic religion. The rituals and theology separating Abrahamic faith from Canaanite religion reinforces the “choseness” of Abraham and the wickedness of most Canaanite culture.

Despite the texts generally negative view, in certain segments Abraham honors Canaanite people and religion. He pays tithes to Melchizedek, understanding El Elyon, a Canaanite deity who is “God Most High,” as Yahweh (14:22). Melchizedek’s is the apex of Canaanite religion, worshiping Abraham’s God, only by a different name. This deity was likely the highest in the Canaanite pantheon, and Abraham’s connection of this name with Yahweh may be due to Melchizedek’s conception of El Elyon as displaying Yahweh’s attributes. Abraham simply sees no difference between Yahweh and El Elyon in this text or a few others: he builds altars to the god El (22:9), which he also connects with Yahweh (22:11).[2]

Abraham’s attitude toward them, then, is not only shaped by the wickedness of some, but also by the righteousness of a few. He enters into treaty’s (21:27) and is even buried among some of them who honor him and his wife (25:8-10).[3]

In the end, full realization of Yahweh’s promises necessitated that Abrahamic faith avoid fraternization with the wickedness of the Canaanites. However, the boundaries were rather porous when it came to Canaanites who were generally righteous in character.

In a previous post I argued that everything is sacred. That is, all aspects of our lives are sacred because the Spirit permeates all things. Taking a bath is sacred. Baptism is sacred. Doing the laundry is sacred. The Eucharist is sacred.

What I unwittingly communicated in that post, however, was that taking a bath and getting Baptized are sacred in the same way and to the same degree. And though Luther says that every time we wash our face we should think of our Baptism, I am convinced that this reasoning is flawed. There is something distinctively set apart about the sacraments. That is, the sacraments are holy in a different way and to a different degree than taking a shower is holy.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think I was on the right track in that post, I just think there were implications of that line of reasoning that I hadn’t explored. In this post, I want to suggest that the problem with the previous post wasn’t so much that I uplifted the bath (which was the intent), but that in doing so I unfortunately drug Baptism down to the level of a bath.

Instead of positing an “everything is equally sacred” model, I want to continue to suggest that everything is sacred, including a bath, but that all things are not sacred in the same way or to the same degree. While a bath is sacred because the Spirit is present with us during that time, there is a very real sense in which the church has always held that Baptism is a time and ritual which invokes the Spirit in a special way. The sacraments of the church invite the presence of the Spirit in a distinct way. So, yes, my bath might be sacred because the Spirit communes with me there – indeed, some of my best times of worship and fellowship with the Spirit have been while showering – but it is not sacred in the same way as Baptism.

To illustrate this I want to pull from the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. Under the Old Covenant, the people of God worshipped and met with Yahweh at the Temple. The Temple and its objects were all considered “holy” or set apart from common use. But within the Temple there was a “Most Holy Place.” The existence of the Most Holy Place didn’t negate the holiness of the other spaces and objects, it merely suggested that there is a continuum of holiness. Everything in the Temple was holy, but this particular space and the objects within that space were more holy and holy in a different way.

So too it is with the Spirit’s activities in the life of the church. Mundane things such as eating and drinking can be made holy by the presence and activity of the Spirit of God. But there are some things which are Most Holy. Baptism, the Eucharist, the gathering together of the community on Sunday – these things are Most Holy. Common time, which is never common because of the Spirit, becomes increasingly holy. Common objects, such as bread and wine, become Most Holy during the Eucharist. And common water becomes Most Holy during Baptism.

Everything is still sacred. But some things are more sacred and in a different way.
And what was once routine was now the perfect joy – Switchfoot

For all our debates about the nature and genre of the Creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2, I’m amazed by the lack of discussion surrounding the meaning of the Spirit’s activities in 1:2 where the text reads, “And the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the deep.”

We’ve been so sidetracked by other questions, often questions the text isn’t even asking, that we’ve overlooked this odd and fascinating feature of the Creation narrative – the presence and activity of God’s Spirit.

Neglecting the Spirit’s role in creation is easy for us, not only because we’re distracted by the Creationism vs. Evolution questions, but also because we’ve severely limited the Spirits role in the Christian life to conviction of sin and assurance of salvation. Or, more specifically, we’ve limited the Spirit’s role to our subjective devotional lives.

But prior to the need for conviction of sin and the need for assurance of salvation, the Spirit was involved in the work of creation. Contrary to our privatized Pneumatology, the fingerprints of the Spirit are clearly displayed in the cosmos.

But what do those finger prints look like? And why was the Spirit hovering over the deep?

By placing the Spirit within Genesis 1:2, where we have the beginning of a movement from darkness and void to order and light, the author suggests the Spirit is the agent by which creation is given form and order. The Spirit is not removed from the creation; the Spirit is intimately with the creation, guiding its development and progress along with the spoken word of God.

The Spirit’s hovering over the face of the deep is significant. For the ancient Hebrews, the sea was a force of chaos and unruliness. Often mythologized in Babylonian religions, the chaotic character of the sea is confirmed by numerous biblical accounts: Noah’s Flood and the destruction of the entire world, the crossing of the Red Sea, Jonah and the whale, Jesus and the calming of the Storm. Even more telling is in Revelation when the sea is the place from which the great Beast comes (13:1) and, ultimately, a place to be destroyed in the new creation: “and there was no longer any sea.”(21:1)

Furthermore, within our narrative, it is important to note that the deep is possibly a subtle reference to a Babylonian deity, Tehoim, “a belligerent and monstrous ocean goddess.” If so, Genesis 1:2 would have been an especially comforting verse for ancient Hebrews wrestling with the constant pressures of Babylonian culture and religion. Not only are the chaotic waters of the deep under the Spirit’s dominion, but implicitly and subversively, Babylonian religion is stripped of its power and demonstrated to be inferior to the religion of Yahweh. For in our narrative, the Spirit is holding at bay the chaotic forces of the world – Babylonian religious and cultural influence, to be more specific. The Spirit drifts over the deep and demonstrates the dominion of God over the disorder soiling the life of an exiled people attempting to be faithful to Yahweh’s covenant “in a foreign land.” (Ps. 137:1-4)

I know the objections will be that there are no forces of evil yet b/c Genesis 3 has not yet occurred. But, again, like the Creationism debates, I don’t think that’s the question the narrative asks.

Rather, it assumes some sort of rebellion has already occurred. You see, the pre-Fall narrative is replete with numerous subtle references to Babylonian deities, and even words which indicated violent subjugation (1:28). Furthermore, such an answer also accounts for the mysterious serpent in Genesis 3 – another possible allusion to a Babylonian deity, and one which would, again, make a lot of sense to an ancient Hebrew person struggling with the constant influences of Babylonian religion and culture.

Thus, what we’re learning from Genesis 1:2 is that those forces of chaos, those things in the world that are disorderly and unruly, are still held in check by the Spirit. The Spirit is already at work to bring the creation back to its original intention – the order of God.

The implication of this is, yes, that there were forces of death operative within creation prior to Genesis 3, but these forces were not yet operative within humanity or the earth in which humanity resided. But these forces of death are being checked by the Spirit. Indeed, even though the narrative makes subtle references to pagan deities, these subtle references are subtle precisely because the narrator wants the reader to see that the sea was created by God and that God is in control. The sea is not a deity, it is part of Yahweh’s creation and He is sovereign over it as the Spirit hovers over the deep and keeps it in its place (Ps. 140:9). “The author here plainly understands God’s act of creation to have involved some type of conflict with cosmic chaos, but also clearly portrays Yahweh as being more than up to the task.”

So what is the Spirit doing hovering over the face of the deep? Displaying and maintaining God’s sovereignty over creation. Demonstrating God’s intimate concern for the details of His creation. And ensuring the ancient reader that God maintains control over the chaotic influences and forces of false religion. The gigs up: the Sea is demythologized and shown to be part of creation. It is not an independent agent, and insofar as chaotic forces do control the sea, Genesis 1 will not allow us to despair, as if Yahweh has lost his sovereignty.

*I reserve the right to change my mind later about any of this.*

I have a question to ask you folks:

Me? Its gotta be the violence of God in the Old Testament. I can handle textual composition problems. I can handle problems of causality and God’s power, and I can deal with contradictions between the narrative of the Bible and what we can tell about the world through science and history. But when I look at the God of the New Testament and the God of the Old Testament, I can understand how some early Christians opted to ignore or reject the Old Testament completely. I am no where near close to doing that, but I am just saying that I can understand the impulse.

So, what does this for you? Be honest. There’s gotta be problems that you are struggling with (or you are probably ignoring implications of certain things).

Update: There is another question that I run into when I study the New Testament period. It has the potential to reshape the way I look at the canon we have constructed. I’ve wrestling with it for some time. I hope to be able to articulate it well sometime soon in the future.

Persons have emotions. Even unborn babies respond emotionally to certain stimuli. But when we think of the Holy Spirit we don’t think of a person, we think of a force or energy. This is largely because, in our minds, the Spirit does not have emotion.

We don’t think the Spirit has emotions for two reasons. First, on a popular level, we simply do not read our Bible’s close enough. Our preconceptions of the Spirit as a force and shadowy ghost color our ability to see those texts which speak of the Spirit’s emotion. Second, on a more academic level, Classical theism has, since Augustine, argued that God does not really have emotions. That is, all those texts which speak of God being angry, or happy, or regretful are anthropopathic: primarily human passions or emotions cast on God. God does not really feel anger, in Classical theism, “anger” is just a human way of explaining certain theological realities.

This is largely because in Classical theism God cannot change. Having a vast array of emotions leaves open the possibility of changing from one to another. God is perfect and any change from perfection is imperfection. Since emotions require change, this would necessitate that God moves about in various levels of imperfection.

To me, this betrays more of a Platonic view of perfection than a biblical view of perfection. For Plato, for everything on earth there was a perfect heavenly reality. The earthly things could change, fade, improve or destruct, but the heavenly reality would remain perfectly changeless. Augustine, taking this idea, placed it upon God – God, the ultimate heavenly being, cannot change. And if God cannot change, then God cannot feel real emotion b/c that necessitates change.

The biblical view of God, one that is more Hebraic than Greek,[1] is that God is not Immutable (that is unchanging). Rather God can change and still be perfect. Perfection does not require changelessness according to the Bible and genuine personhood necessitates emotion and thus, change.

There are many Scriptures that people use to prove that God does not change. They are all similar to “God is the same yesterday, today and forever.” What these texts really demonstrate, however, is not that God doesn’t change or have emotion, but that, from a faithfulness perspective, God will honor His covenants. When he makes a promise, you can be guaranteed that He will keep it. His character does not change, even if His emotions do.

That said, allowing God to have emotions is important in this discussion because for us to recover a notion of the Spirit as a living person, we must recover the Spirit’s emotions.

Just a quick list of the Spirit’s emotions should suffice for now:

Deep Agony: Ephesians 4:25-32. Compare with Christ in Matt. 26:37, where the same word is employed to describe Christ’s agony during the Passion.

Intense Desire/Jealousy: James 4:5. This is also Paul’s word for a longing to see someone whom he has been separated from.

Groaning that demonstrates solidarity with out weaknesses: Romans 8:26

Insult or outraged: Hebrews 10:29. The word here is a hapaxlegomena, so the exactly meaning is ambiguous. But either translation communicates emotion.

Ability to participate in loving union/fellowship: Philippians 2:1.

Desires that war against the flesh: Galatians 5:17

Love: Romans 15:30.

Let us not shackle the Holy Spirit by our theological presuppositions or our inattention to biblical texts. Viewed in light of good biblical exegesis, the Spirit is a person who expressed genuine emotion. I know our “assumptions about what is ‘proper’ for the divine nature to be like can make it difficult for us to take seriously what God’s nature is like as revealed in the gospel.”[2] But let us make an effort to see Spirit as revealed in Scripture: emotions, change and all.

What is the word of God?

1. The Bible in a reader’s native language which is faithful in message to the autographs
2. The autographs of biblical texts
3. The message behind texts we consider inspired
4. Jesus
5. Other

Danny, over at Personman, claims that God is imaginary.  He points his readers to this site which outlines 50 reasons why God is not real.  Danny then takes two examples that be believes demonstrate that the God of the Bible is not an actual God.

The first line of reasoning concerns the body of Jesus – but not in a manner you would expect.  The Bible says that God was once in human form and then withdrew into the heavens.  Humanity has spent quite a bit of time looking in the heavens – no God to be had up there.  We have been to the moon and have peered light-years into the past, yet no we have seen “gold-plated kingdom floating up there. We see only the vacuum of space. But now God and Heaven have moved to ‘another dimension’ or ‘outside of space and time.’”

The second line of reasoning examines prayer.  Quoting Mark 11:24 and John 14:14, Danny establishes that if the Bible is true and there is a God, then prayers must be answered. Given this, the effects of prayer in human lives should be verifiable. However, Danny lists three scientific studies that demonstrate that it is not – Study 1, Study 2, Study 3.

Because prayer does not work and God, through the Bible says it will, and the Bible describes Jesus as physically going up to heaven and there is no physically visible heaven, then God is imaginary.

Danny issues a challenge to his readers at the end of the post – and this is the strongest portion of the post.  He says that if you cannot come up with concrete proof that our God exists, then “can you claim that your beliefs are any more rational than Islam, FSM or Scientology?”

I have a few problems with his arguments.  Firstly, he is operating from a purely empirical and rationalist standpoint.  We posit a spiritual God that is hidden.  Because of this, setting up a falsifying experiment (looking for a physical Jesus in a physical heaven) that does not test for what you are looking for is just bad reasoning.  Secondly, the prayer experiment does not test for a God, it only shows a non-positive correlation between two phenomena – outcomes of heart surgery (as in the last study) and prayer for that outcome to be positive.  It really does not show anything about God from an existential standpoint.  Lastly, and this is the most important point, if, on the one hand, you assume from the beginning that God does not exist the studies only confirming what you already think is the case; if, on the other hand, you assume beforehand that it does exist, then all you say is that it is not easily swayed to act as humans want it to act and that the study has wrongly interpreted those two naked sentences from the Bible.

Why does a presupposed spirit God have to be physically observed? I submit that we see indirect evidence of God everyday.  Wondrous mountains, the fibonacci sequence in nature, beautiful star factories, and the eyes of my niece all serve as indirect evidence of God’s hand in the world.

“Does God exist” is an unanswerable question from a purely empirical standpoint. We can interpret the observable phenomena as evidence for a creator/God or as natural and random processes.  What it comes down to is that Danny’s interpretive framework does not allow for a god who hides himself – mine does. It is a difference in framework.

What remains is Danny’s last challenge – why the God of the Bible?  To quote my good friend JR, “We have the best story.”  When I consider what I can see, what I can deduce, what I can reason, the story found in the Bible is the best one.  Buddhism has a nice one, but I don’t have their givens.

What do you all think?  I highly encourage you to respond to Danny at his blog.

The 218th Christian Carnival is up over at Kiwi and an Emu.

218th Christian Carnival

Some highlights:

The Melchizedek Tradition from the Bible Archive

Cherishing Fidelity is an examination of Proverbs 3:3 over at Light Along the Journey

Why are people so anti-1 Corinthians 14:26-33? looks at why we can’t seem to apply what Paul writes here to the church today from carnival hostee Kiwi and an Emu.