THE FALL, BEFORE AND BEYOND
PAUL: A POST-POSTLAPSARIAN THEOLOGY OF
DEATH?
ψυχῆς πείρατα ἰὼν οὐκ ἂν ἐξεύροιο πᾶσαν ἐπιπορευόμενος ὁδόν· οὕτω βαθὺν λόγον ἔχει
So deep is the measure of the soul, that even if you went traveling all roads you would not discover its bounds. Heraclitus, Fragment DK B45.
INTRODUCTION
This essay follows upon four
decades of reflection which began with my admission to an
Anglican religious community in Adelaide, South Australia,
in 1980. I had for many years previously entertained wishes
of this kind. At that particular point in my life, I was
nearing twenty-eight years of age, and subsequently to the
death of my mother's mother, I had decided the time to enter
a monastery was ripe. I remember quite clearly just when and
where I made that decision: February the 2nd, The Feast Of
The Purification, or Candelmas as it is known to Anglicans.
I had been sitting in Belmore Park, Railway Square, Sydney,
and on the same afternoon I attended the Eucharist at
Christchurch St. Laurence. The account in the gospel of Luke
which serves as the basis of this feast, mentions the
offering of two turtle doves; in accordance with which, I
resolved that my monastic sojourn should last two years. At
that time, there were three different Anglican religious
communities for men in Australia. I inspected each of them,
and finally entered The Society Of The Sacred Mission, the
basis of its charter being theological education. In the
second year there, I was summarily enrolled in theology at
the Adelaide College Of Divinity. I am, to this day,
extremely grateful for the experiences which my stay there
fostered, not the least of which, was my decision to
continue my vocation by writing theology. The rest, as they
say, is history.
'Rest', albeit of another, if
related kind, is the direct focus of the present essay, as
of much metaphysical belief, and religious observance. I
soon discovered other members of the same community whose
motivation for joining was identical to my own - bereavement
following the death a close family member. Two of the men
there had had brothers who had died in their youth. This
certainly gave me pause for reflection, for the concept of
fraternity is foundational to such orders. (I must mention,
as among other things in its favour, that SSM included
women.) Upon that discovery I remember telling my then 28
year old self that 'We need a theology of death.' I now see
this need as ever at the psychological core of Christian
belief, just as its prominence rests at the heart of almost
all religious and/or metaphysical understanding, a fact to
which the final miracle narrative in the gospel of John pays
tribute. The visitor statistics to this site confirm the
priority this issue provokes for interested parties. It has
been said that the chapter on eschatology is indeed a large
one in the book of theology, Christian or otherwise. Equally, it has been said 'Grief is a long time.'
The same can be said of
philosophy and theology; no one becomes a philosopher or a
theologian before the age of fifty. I confess to having a
foot in both camps, but since I take my cues from 'holy
writ', I deem myself first and foremost a theologian. I
confess also, that although now, being on the wrong side of
seventy years of age, I am more or less temerarious enough
to proffer an answer to that need. By which I mean that none
of us is ever sufficiently advanced in wisdom nor just as
necessarily, also in years, to undertake such a task. Even
so, I feel obliged to make the effort. The recent death of
my own mother has been a catalyst in this respect.
I take the present
opportunity to pin to the mast my own theological and
philosophical colours. These have often proved chameleonic
over time, and continue to do so up to the present day.
Nevertheless certain tendencies are constant. I no longer
consider myself Anglican, nor do I espouse any Christian
confessional stance. My own theological education was never
trammelled by concessions co-opted by such powers due to
their sponsorship. It was pursued after only one year,
independently of any particular church, Anglican or other,
true to James Barr's proposition, that there is no
confessional, biblical theology. But there is such
of course, given the essential pluralism of the gospels.
Matthew, for example, is a quite Roman Catholic affair, due
to its inherent character; alternatively we may say, that
Roman Catholicism confirms the theological idiom native to
that particular gospel. It is premised, as is the (world?)
religion of Judaism, on the function of will as a
fundamental epistemic and psychic constituent of human
consciousness. (The same affinity between Roman Catholicism
and the gospel of Matthew applies in the case of
Anglicanism, albeit there, to a difference in degree and
kind. That is unsurprising, granted the historic route of
that confession, in which both the Roman Empire and Roman
Church played seminal roles.) But this is offset by the
gospel of Mark; and furthermore supplemented by those of
Luke and John. I do not think the pluralism of the gospels
as a totality, has ever been fully appreciated or
understood. Their genuinely variant, and apparently
competing claims have much to teach us concerning the unity
of the church. They also function as a vital point of
departure for the experience of faiths other than
Christianity incumbent on all communities of faith in the
third millennium. Thus, in conjunction with the Pneumatology
we encounter in The Apocalypse, they provide the basis for a
'Christian' theology of religions as inseparable from the
same, ecclesiology.
My own early and ongoing
forays into foreign denominational and theological fields,
were inevitably set in motion from my role as a church
organist from the age of fifteen; this lasted until the age
of fifty. For the most part, organists are by nature
ecclesiastically promiscuous. They tend to be pre-ordained
to seek and find instruments to their liking, irrespectively
of confessional boundaries. In my own case, indifference to
party lines inclined me, from an impressionably early age,
to stray into denominational pastures far afield from those
of my kith and kin. Such waywardness has always seemed to me
justifiable in light of the accidental time and place of
one's birth, its evident arbitrariness. I have worked in
various churches in the capacity of organist: Roman
Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian and Uniting Church. Given
that my paternal grandfather was a member of the Greek
Orthodox communion, I have also made it my business to
become acquainted with that particular liturgical tradition.
Alas, it does not include organ music or instrumental music
of any kind. An early educational background as a
schoolteacher of foreign languages only confirmed
this obliviousness to confessional fidelity.
Concerning the philosophical,
I confess readily to aversion towards so-called
'existentialist' philosophies and theologies. Quite early in
my intellectual life I was exposed to the former in the
study of French literature in training as a schoolteacher. I
believe that they have vitiated our sense of the phylogenic
being in their intemperate emphasis on the role of the
individual. Individuality obtains in community, not in
despite of it. The heroically anti-heroic antics of a
Meursault or a Roquentin do not answer to this reality. Unsurprisingly then, given that
language is intrinsically public, intrinsically
'phylogenic', not a single existentialist, to my
knowledge, has provided anything in the way of a
theoretical understanding of language or semiotics in
general. So too, Heidegger's mitsein appears as
little more than a sop to the Cerberus of social
psychology. These deficiencies were soon seen to be
addressed in ensuing and various scholarly trends
touting the label 'post-structuralist' and 'postmodern'.
Nonetheless these too fought shy of any logically
organized attitude towards philosophical psychology,
abjuring the 'metanarrative', and methodological system.
To which they remain just as ostentatiously antagonistic
as the existentialism in which they were rooted. None as
such, is more than a congeries of various 'isms', or
'wasms' as the case may be, wanting in coherence,
consistency, and credibility. By this last term I mean
credible content; that is, content which may satisfy in us
the will-to-believe, so that, to paraphrase C. S. Peirce,
thought may not cease, but rather, at least 'rest'.
In the present
('eschatological') epoch, since August 6th and 9th, 1945,
humankind lives under the mantle of possible total
self-annihilation. Scientific-technological 'advances' in
the field of weapons of mass destruction have assured this
as an authentic potential. Never before in human history has
this been so. This is a simple fact, with which evolutionary
psychology has flagrantly failed to reckon. Much like
Freudian hypothesization concerning the death instinct,
Heidegger's insistence of the psychological function of Thanatos,
equally utterly fails to account for such a development.
'Being-towards-death' after Hiroshima/Nagasaki has assumed a
collective dimension as well as the prior ontogenic
dimension which always already obtained. Arguably, this
phylogenic aspect is more real than its ontogenic
counterpart, not that I do doubt the latter. It is as real
as the role of Eros qua desire in forging a level or
order of being, that is decidedly ontogenic, that is, wholly
personalised, wholly my own as this particular and no other
individuum. But since the second projected volume of
Sein Und Zeit (1927), which might have addressed this
issue, never appeared, Heidegger's metapsychological
treatment of death, like Freud's, remains 'pre-apocalyptic',
sc. virtually pre-modern. This deficiency might have been compensated for
by others, more or less sharing the same outlook, such as
the French existentialists already mentioned; but it has
not been.
I am not the
first writer to have observed the unnerving rapport
between The Transfiguration and the fateful events
in world history just noted, which ushered in the era in
which we now live: the cloud, the voice, the blinding
light, the compelling fear of the disciples in the
presence of that particular epiphany, and above all, its
relation to death. Nor am I alone in having noted an
equally unnerving fact, to wit, the celebration of the
event in the Christian West until fairly recently: August
6th. All three miracles of virtual transcendence, which
bear unmistakable relations to the resurrection
narratives, particularly those in the gospel of John, are
cast in the same register of foreboding. Their tone is
resolutely set against that of the three complementary
Eucharistic miracles, as heralded by the recurrent motif
of crossing 'to the other side'. But of the three
narratives of this class, The Transfiguration
itself, is the least mindful of the phylogenic. Its proper
accent on 'The Son, The Beloved' is also the
accentuation of ontogeny, one's own life and death as
disjunct and distinguished from that of the many, the
'tribe', the collective. The text of John 1.14-18, which
concludes the logosode, is sometimes cited as a parallel
of sorts to this miracle narrative, missing from John's
gospel. In which, he refers to 'the Word become flesh' as
'the only Son from the Father', and 'the
only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father', (monogenou~v, monogenh\v,
John 1.14, 18, emphases added.) So too, the miracle as
recorded, is striking in its difference from the other two
of its kind, for only three of the disciples are mentioned
as witnesses, and these are afterwards enjoined to secrecy
for a time (Mark 9.2, 9). Both other miracles of virtual
transcendence include the twelve as the body corporate.
The general stress on the
ontogenic mode of 'existence' over and against its
phylogenic dimension, vitiates much existentialist
metapsychology. In effect, Rousseau's concept of la volonté
générale is very much closer to, and more compatible with
the biblical metapsychology of the will. Will remains the
basis of the social contract, as we note from the
first, in the Torah. The mitzvot are universally applicable
to the adherents of Judaism, in which they do not differ
substantially from secular law itself, since it is by
'common' law that we all must abide or suffer punishment. In
effect, Torah does indeed provide much of the genealogy of
secular law in the Christian West. Law and language go hand
in glove in this matter. (I shall argue for the comparable
psychological role of Torah as the fountainhead of
nomological, deductive reason in 'Judaeo-Christian'
cultures; that is, for its originary function in the
development of western science; in both cases, for good and
ill.) By and large then, the existential person remains a
thoroughgoing individual, with minimal relational ties to
others; alone in remotest isolation and splendour, subject
to the bidding of a 'personal', evidently free and possibly
solipsistic will. The early manifestos of existentialism
were almost uniformly, inherently arelational if not
non-relational, in their understanding of communal
existence. And if love be the uniquely active ingredient in
one's Christian experiences, as is recommended to us by the
Johannine corpus, it is difficult to envisage its
reconciliation with existentialist creeds given this
proclivity.
Apart from Karl Jaspers, who
sets himself adrift from theology from the start,
championing a vision of 'transcendence' uncommonly void of
any reference to the Judaic or Christian theological
traditions, similarly to Heidegger in his treatment of
conscience and guilt, it is difficult to comprehend the
appeal this school of thought has had in the last century,
given its endemically characteristic hostility to theology.
There remains Gabriel Marcel, for whom mystery stands as the
ultimate, explanatory strategy. I shall say more in this
vein, due to my conviction that the 'mystery of the family'
- and the symbolic feminine - and the 'consubstantiality'
shared in varying degrees by its members, are obvious
matters in any consideration of the relational nature of
consciousness a propos of the death of those members; and
that its exposition transcends relegation tout court,
to the status of mystery.
A common feature of existentialism, indeed, seems to be the abdication of the quest for clearness. M. Marcel is there to tell us that mysteries must not be degraded into problems. We would like to suggest, in opposition, that the business of philosophy is with problems and not with mysteries. If the apostles of clearness have sometimes been trivial, this is not because they have confined themselves to problems but because they have not approached the most important problems. Even theology, although it is concerned with mysteries, is concerned with them only to the extent that it is possible to put precise questions about them. To the wholly mysterious the only possible homage is silence.
There are atheistic existentialists and religious existentialists, Catholic existentialists and Protestant existentialists. It is difficult to see what all these can have in common except, perhaps, a manner of approach to their very different destinations. One faint clue offers itself on the superficial level: this is that there does not appear to be any really cheerful existentialist. (The Meaning Of Existentialism, D. J. B. Hawkins, Blackfriars, London, 1951, pp 3, 4.)
The popularity of existentialism as a
legitimate philosophical reference point, if not an actual
basis for theology, generally seems to have depended upon
the works of Kierkegaard, the prime mover. In spite of his
psychological disquisitions on faith, ultimately, his is
just short of a counsel of despair, and finally vaporous as
to both genuine philosophical and theological content. I am
in agreement with Brand
Blanshard's estimate of his significance for
philosophy. I find him, if not the European Romanticism
whose approaching, dying breath he represents, unsympathetic
in the extreme to systematic, theological statement. The surfeit of rhetoric and deficit of logic one
encounters in Kierkegaard, though not on a par with that of
Nietzsche insofar as it is not quite as vicious, is
nevertheless the same. Witness for example his attachment to
the story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son,
Isaac. In the final analysis, one suspects that like
Tertullian, Kierkegaard believes precisely because
it is absurd. Such are the intellectual vagaries of
existentialism.
The primary objection I will raise against
existentialist weltenschauungen must concern
time. Here then, I have Heideggerian existentialism in my
sights. I will argue for the primacy of time and eternity as
the dialectic most profitable to philosophical-theological
discourse. Existentialism generally regards the infinite,
the atemporal, the timeless, along with essence rather than
'existence', as problematic, to say the least. These it
considers nugatory, metaphysical and so decadent,
constructs. On the contrary, I put that without at least a
notional rendition of the eternal, temporality itself is
meaningless, or as Whitehead has said, 'feeble minded'.
My own preferences in this matter look to
process philosophy, beginning with Samuel Alexander and A.
N. Whitehead. That said, I dissent thoroughly from the
pursuit of metaphysics according to ontology. Epistemology
remains for me the first philosophical frame of theological
reference. Here I pursue the formulation in the prologue of
the fourth gospel, of The Son as 'the Word'. Thus both
doctrinal domains, that of creation, and that of salvation,
are requisitely epistemological because they are precisely
Christological. My own understanding is that time (space :
time) and mind (mind : body) are inextricably bound
together. This warrants the accentuation of epistemology
over that of ontology, in pursuit of a specifically
Christian and biblical metaphysics.
That said, I note certain shortcomings of
process philosophy, which stem for the most, from its
epistemology. All too few of the examples of
sense-perception which Whitehead cites, are other than that
of sight; thus there is no comprehensive account of the
'physical' pole. In his defense, I should add that the terms
'feeling' and 'prehension' which predominate throughout his
conceptual scheme, and which approximate to the use of
'intentionality' in the present work, certainly imply haptic
sentience. (For a more detailed consideration of this
connection see Geir, Nicholas, Intentionality
And Prehension, at Religion Online.) Further to
Whitehead's own epistemology, there is finally no abiding
and lucid portrayal of the 'mental and physical poles'.
Biblical metaphysics from the very beginning makes for a
surer and more cogent understanding of the same. I refer to
them in terms of transcendence and immanence; but
furthermore, in terms of the nuanced difference between pure
'and' virtual transcendence on the one hand, and that
of actual 'and' virtual immanence on the other. This
nuance is of decisive value. (In this regard, see, Lawrence,
Nathaniel, Morris, Whitehead's
Philosophical Development: A Critical History Of The
Background Of Process And Reality.)
It is not entirely clear just
what to understand by these Process philosophical terms,
'mental and physical poles', nor how precisely to
assimilate them to biblical metapsychology. (Their
integration with the description of 'conceptual
prehensions' as of two different 'species', namely,
'subjective' and objective', makes for further confusion.)
The obvious means of the assimilation of the former would
be to equate the mental pole with pure conceptual forms,
and the physical pole with forms of actual immanence, that
is, perceptual memory. The former are related to the
latter externally, and the latter to the former
internally. So whereas the relation of the pure conceptual
form space to the perceptual form acoustic memory is
announced in the acoustic semiosis as the perfect fifth,
say that of Cb-F#, the relation of the actual perceptual
radical to the pure conceptual radical is articulated as
the perfect fourth, say that of F#-Cb, its inversion. But
this leaves out of consideration the aconscious, with its
restructuring of the six elementary categories, divisible
according to the first level application of the
categoreal paradigm, transcendence : immanence. Thus pure
conceptual categories are represented by flattened tones
relatively to their analogues, and the lowest of the two
ends of the dodecaphonic scale(s), whereas categories of
actual immanence are represented by the higher, hence the
tones sharpened relatively to their analogues.
It is these analogues which
introduce real nuance and proscribe any hard and fast
simple relation between the 'poles' as dichotomous without
remainder. This then means that the real equivalence to
Whitehead's systematic discussion of the bipolarity in God
rests upon the second level application of the
categoreal paradigm. It therefore takes into account all
twelve categories, and not merely the six which are
unambiguous in the first instance concerning the same
paradigm. Hence the physical pole of the conceptual form
space, would be acoustic imagination; and the
conceptual pole of acoustic memory would be the conceptual
form of unity space : time. In this way, the
systematic account of God's bipolar nature in process
theology is tantamount to the one-to-one, analogous
correspondence between those entities which combine pure
and virtual transcendence on the one hand, and actual
and virtual immanence on the other. The acoustic
semiosis maintains this division with equal clarity; in
every case the differential corresponds to a semitone:
Cb-C in the example of space as conceptual form relative
to acoustic imagination as perceptual imagination, and
F#-F in the case of acoustic memory as actual
immanence relative to the conceptual form of unity space :
time, a category of virtual immanence. There are indeed
multiple instances of relations between these poles, and
there is no need to discount the previous example as one
such. But its outstanding because primary incidence, which
first requires examination, and as expressed in the
occurrence of the two hexadic whole-tone scales of the
dodecaphonic series, is that of the congruence of
analogous categoreal entities. In what follows I discuss
this briefly vis-à-vis the Peripatetic axiom.
Further caveats should be
entered a propos of process theology. Neither are any
subtle distinctions made in order to account for the past,
which is simply one massive agglomeration, as is the
future, unless these be taken as part of the discussion of
'modes of perception' - an unfortunate choice of
terminology. That is, unless they are part of the
discussion of symbolic reference and its transference from
'causal efficacy' to 'presentational immediacy'. Nor can
I accept its confidence in mathematical and/or geometrical
(topological) method as fully availing metaphysical
exposition. The method of 'extensive abstraction' remains
both bloodless and dubious by my lights, in any attempt to
decipher the space : time relations of events or 'actual
occasions' in relation to consciousness. I do not accept
that these relations are susceptible of such a method, given
my hermeneutic. Their disclosure is primarily the business
of the acoustic semiosis. Granting these caveats, of all
trends within philosophy of the last century, process
thought remains the most congenial and available to
theology.
Here too I vouch for the likelihood that the greatest single
innovation in theology in the last century was the
interfaith movement. Liberation theology might be an equal
claimant for the same, and its encompassing agenda stands it
in good stead. Part of that must be feminist theologies.
Their foremost, guiding model however, at once places
political, if not ideological considerations on the same
footing as special revelation in particular. That is to say,
they are not theological in the first instance. And since
special revelation, the two canons, comprise what must be
for me the primary resource for theology, theological intent
becomes the primary, governing objective. Hence I reserve
the right to criticism of feminist biblical criticism. The
examples of whose failures I cite in the following I do not
take to be representative of feminist liberation theology.
Nevertheless, the wholesale failure of feminist theologies
to establish a viable relation to the interfaith movement,
which I see as its responsibility entailed by the biblical
concept of 'symbolic feminine', once again manifest in The
Apocalypse, must surely be reckoned in terms of failure.
There is nothing new in such a claim. At the conclusion of
the gospel we note the final presentation of the theme
of the failure of the disciples, this time extrapolated to
the three women who venture to the tomb of Jesus on the day
after the Sabbath. Which is by way of saying that in general
terms, women are no better than men, nor are men any worse
than women. But that is not saying much for either:
And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe; and they were amazed. And he said to them, "Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you." And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 16.5-8.)
That said, the first appearance story in John
contradicts Mark's account:
Mary Magdalene went and said to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord"; and she told them that he had said these things to her. (John 20.18.)
Liberation theology has looked to the Exodus
tradition for inspiration, if not justification, a text
which it consequently privileges. The relation of this same
tradition to the genocidal conquest of Canaan, that is, herem
in that 'theology', even if only by implication, I take to
be problematic in the extreme. If from bondage we
are set free, then for what are we set free? With freedom comes responsibility.
If the agency of that same freedom is simply for the
oppression of the other, then it has been in vain. Christ's own exodon, of
which he speaks with Moses and Elijah in Luke's account of
The Transfiguration (Luke 9.30, 31) is certainly of
a different order from that which follows the 'exodus' in
the Tanakh.
Liberation Theology in general appeals to the exodus as scriptural warrant, and rarely if ever addresses this contradiction of its ends and means, implicit in the biblical texts. The same lacuna is even stranger and more incongruous in the case of specifically feminist, biblical theologies of liberation, since we take unjust warfare to be a typologically masculine expression of evil, first presaged in the fratricide of Abel by Cain. (Even though women may now serve in certain areas of the militaries of some nations, conscription, where it prevails, with few, that is, anomalous exceptions, remains overwhelmingly the allotted fate of males. Details are available at The Pew Research Centre. For an argument countervailing the accepted wisdom of this social more see Benatar, David, The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men And Boys, pp 104-121.) Further to the point regarding Liberation theology and the conquest of Canaan, there are those, I am one such, who take the story of herem to be the most onerous of the 'texts of terror', or as Paul Anderson has put it, 'the greatest theological and hermeneutical problem in the Bible.' (The Destructive Power Of Religion: Violence In Judaism, Christianity And Islam, Volume 3, Chapter 3, Genocide Or Jesus: A God Of Conquest Or Pacifism? p 31.) The difficulties surrounding any credible Christian, biblical eschatology would seem to pale in comparison to those which the stories of herem pose for the ethics of belief, and so I leave them to Liberation theologians.
Why mention this here? Because in what
follows I adduce the conceptual category female : male, to
be of paramount importance in framing a Christian
eschatology, and because of the identity political wars
waged by partisan feminism in the last century. Their legacy
is a minefield which needs to be cleared. Also because I
believe the same category, the anthropic, male : female,
largely informs the perspective of the author(s) of The
Apocalypse, a book very clearly concerned with the
phenomenon of both masculinity and war. It has become a sometimes
insufferable commonplace of the hermeneutic of suspicion,
to allege misogynist gender bias in certain of the New
Testament narratives. (I mention for instance, in passing,
that I recently attended a Eucharist in which the homilist
on the parable of The Lost Son asked in all
seriousness, why the mother of the two sons was not
mentioned? The inference being of course, that she had
been sidelined by male, chauvinistic author(s), not for
example, that she might have taken up and run off with
another man - heaven forfend! The very worst sermon of
this kind which I was ever forced to endure, alleged that
the portraits of Herodias and her daughter in Mark's
version of The Death Of John The Baptist
similarly, malevolently traduced those two women. It is
not such personae, whether fictional or real who
have been traduced by this kind of eisegetical and
ideological nonsense, but the evangelists themselves:
Honi soit qui mal y pense. In some cases, it is
almost certain that their very own sources must have
relied upon the testimony of women. I wish to emphasise
for the sake of the record, that all actually immanent and
virtually immanent modes of intentionality pertain to the
symbolic feminine. This includes of course knowing, the
predominant intentional idiom of Markan theology.)
The focus of this essay is eschatological,
which is why I mention feminist, biblical criticism here and
my chief disaffection for it: viz. that I have not
encountered any feminist, biblical, theological
reconstruction seeking engagement with religious traditions
other than Christianity. Moreover, I see the specifically
feminist theological programme as necessarily
obliged to consider interfaith theology, particularly where
the eschatological is at issue. The categoreal paradigm,
immanence : transcendence sorts eschatological time into two
epochs, and to these the Pneumatological-eschatological
categories correspond analogously. Those Pneumatological
categories are symbolic feminine~optic memory, and symbolic
masculine~optic imagination respectively. Thus the chief
theological innovations of the last century ought to have
been those of interfaith and feminist theologies in tandem.
In the essay, I shall advance the reason for such avowals.
Indeed, I shall consider the first incidence of a theology
of gender - or 'sex' if you will - in the canon. There it
occurs, in the text just mentioned, the P creation
narrative, with one of the hallmarks of Christian
revelation, namely the creation of humankind 'in the image
and likeness of God', the doctrine of imago Dei,
just as it does with the other defining feature of Christian
theology, namely Christology. This alone could be considered
sufficient to ensure the theological value of that narrative
but a fortiori the same text is, so I will argue, a
classical and indispensable source of Trinitarian doctrine,
precisely because of its Pneumatological and Christological
tenets.
Additionally, my particular stated
disaffection extends to general dissension from the
widespread tendency of academic theology to downplay, if not
to denigrate, interdisciplinary approaches. That is because the three textual cycles, Genesis 1.1-2.4a, the
messianic series, including the accounts of The Lord's
Supper, and The Apocalypse, the theologies of
creation, salvation and sanctification respectively, are
essential to the formulation of Christian doctrines
which remain foundational to the faith. As an integrated
whole, they systematically recapitulate doctrines of imago
Dei, incarnation, and Trinity. What if anything can
the structural semantic of the P narrative and its
analogical complement, the messianic series, intend if not
Trinitarian doctrine? Is there some other way to understand
the insistent formulation of structural components as part
and parcel of the meaning of both texts, and furthermore,
that of The Apocalypse? Why 'dogmatic' theologians have
failed to address this first and foremost text in
the light of that very doctrine is profoundly
incomprehensible. A modicum of intellectual curiosity
regarding the same doctrine, a fundamental tenet of
Christian belief, and theological expertise in at
least equal measure, should have first prompted scrutiny of
those texts by reason of the obvious fact that numerical and
structural details carry much of its semantic.
Thus I claim that the foremost texts in the
canons which conspicuously avow Trinitarian theology
are Genesis 1.1-2.4a in the Tanakh; and in the New
Testament, the analogous, messianic series. Then there is
The Apocalypse as a whole. All of these narratives bristle
with numerical details and structural features, the more
conspicuous of which are the tetradic and heptadic forms,
first delivered in the P creation story. The Trinitarian
hermeneutic of both that narrative and the messianic series
has been given in the very first two essays of The
Markan Mandala; I do not repeat it here. What bears
repetition is to note the failure of the members of 'the
guild' soi-disant to realize even a notional grasp
of its theological potential for what are fundamental tenets
of Christian doctrine: namely, Trinity, incarnation and imago
Dei.
That the P creation narrative like the messianic (miracle)
series have very largely fallen into theological desuetude
except for critical purposes, the governing intentions of at
least some of which are ideological, or at best, in the
first instance non-theological, is a benchmark of the
current state of biblical theology. On the other hand, that
the Pauline theology of anakephalaiosis where the
supposed aetiology of death is concerned, and other dogmata
semming from it continue to hold their ground in many
quarters, is further evidence of the same. From a personal
point of view, the foreseeable future of biblical theology
seems therefore quite bleak.
In any redress of this situation, the obvious and best place
to begin must be with the gospels, and with the messianic
series in particular. It stands mid-way between those first
and last parts of the canon as a whole to which I have
referred, even if its intervening locus is sometimes blurred
by its closeness to The Apocalypse. Reassessment of the
centrality of that very narrative cycle to Christian
metaphysics must be the first step towards amending what I
can only consider a parlous oversight in contemporary
scholarship. In conclusion I feel reasonably bound to
rephrase an excerpt from the letters of The Apocalypse
addressed to the church(es), and to rescript the admonition
addressed to the disciples in the gospels as follows:
And to the angel of the church in Academia write:
Καὶ ἐπελάθοντο λαβεῖν ἄρτους, καὶ εἰ μὴ ἕνα ἄρτον οὐκ εἶχον
μεθ' ἑαυτῶν ἐν τῷ πλοίῳ. καὶ διεστέλλετο αὐτοῖς λέγων,
Ὁρᾶτε, βλέπετε ἀπὸ τῆς ζύμης τῶν Φαρισαίων καὶ τῆς ζύμης
Ἡρῴδου. καὶ διελογίζοντο πρὸς ἀλλήλους ὅτι Ἄρτους οὐκ
ἔχουσιν. καὶ γνοὺς λέγει αὐτοῖς, Τί διαλογίζεσθε ὅτι ἄρτους
οὐκ ἔχετε; οὔπω νοεῖτε οὐδὲ συνίετε; πεπωρωμένην ἔχετε τὴν
καρδίαν ὑμῶν;
ὀφθαλμοὺς ἔχοντες οὐ βλέπετε
καὶ ὦτα ἔχοντες οὐκ ἀκούετε;
καὶ οὐ μνημονεύετε, ὅτε τοὺς πέντε ἄρτους ἔκλασα εἰς τοὺς
πεντακισχιλίους, πόσους κοφίνους κλασμάτων πλήρεις ἤρατε;
λέγουσιν αὐτῷ, Δώδεκα. Οτε τοὺς ἑπτὰ εἰς τοὺς
τετρακισχιλίους, πόσων σπυρίδων πληρώματα κλασμάτων ἤρατε;
καὶ λέγουσιν [αὐτῷ], Ἑπτά. καὶ ἔλεγεν αὐτοῖς, Οὔπω συνίετε;
(Mark 8.14-21.)
The Apocalypse remains the primary
Pneumatological member of the New Testament canon, along
with Acts. The plethora of fourfold and sevenfold verbal
chains and the explicit references to a variety of sevenfold
supernatural agencies, spirits, golden lampstands, angels,
'spirits of God sent out into all the earth', heads of the
dragon, heads of the beast from the sea, and above all, the
series of seven seals, in connection with the four serial
forms of order, letters, seals, trumpets and vials, these
all harmonize with the rudimentary mathematical content of
the Pneumatological, Eucharistic miracle story.
No satisfactory theology of the Eucharist can afford to
ignore the numerical references in all three Eucharistic
miracle narratives. The demonstrable naiveté and
consensual complicity of academe in which is nothing if
not egregious, and the best indication of the inadequacy
of current Pneumatological doctrine in particular.
For example, I recall attempting to discuss with a member of
the professorial hierarchy of the hallowed halls of
theological learning at Durham University, something of my
interest in the feeding miracle narratives. He not only
baulked at my use of the epithet 'Eucharistic', but refused
it altogether; learned ignorance and academic arrogance at
their best. There are thirty-eight occurrences of the verb eu)xariste/w in the New
Testament:
Matthew uses it of both The Feeding Of The Four Thousand
and of the cup containing the wine which was drunk at The
Last Supper, (Matthew 15.36, 26.27); Mark uses it of
the recapitulation of the details of the feeding miracles,
(Mark 8.6), and of the cup (14.23); Luke uses it of the
bread at The Last Supper (22.19); John, perhaps most
interestingly of all, since his gospel lacks a formal
equivalent to The Last Supper, uses it in the
discourse The Bread Of Life (6.23), in reference to
the prior feeding miracle. I have detailed comparable
instances of terms common to the Eucharistic miracle and The
Last Supper narratives in Miracles As Metaphysics.
The intellectual swagger of this particular representative
of professionalized theology, was breathtaking in its
ignorance and arrogation of authority over the issue, in
spite of a transparent lack of knowledge. It convinced me,
if of nothing else, then of the pointlessness of 'a higher
degree' so-called, after the completion of 'the ordinary
degree' so-called, at The Adelaide College of Divinity, the
theological school of Flinders University, where I enjoyed
similar experiences. Its own Procrustean division of
theology into compartments, systematic, philosophical and
biblical, which outlawed as methodologically transgressive
my own interdisciplinary approach, did likewise. Well might
Mark's Jesus advise us to '" ... beware the leaven of the
Pharisees and the leaven of Herod."' And well might he
rebuke the disciples for obtuseness, and hardness of heart:
I have not found one work which dealt in any way with the figures of these miracles. Commentaries which are intended to explain the Gospels line by line suddenly skip over entire verses when they come to the miracles of the multiplication of bread and fish.
A clear example of what may be termed resistance to understanding is provided by the first rate commentary by Father Raymond E. Brown to the gospel of John in the Anchor Bible. He includes a presentation in table form of all details of the two miracles of multiplication, lining up in parallel columns against each other the two miracles according to each of the four gospels. Every single item in the accounts is compared, but the figures in the miracles are left out. The same blind spot is to be found in similar comparisons by other scholars. (Stecchini, Livio C., A History Of Measures, Part IV: Hebrew Measures, They Have Eyes And Do Not See.)
The P creation narrative consists of two
distinct and differentiated halves, in the ratio 3 : 4.
(This too was a bone of contention between myself and a
member of the aforementioned college, one who had had no
real interest in the creation narrative, like so many of his
colleagues, and who yet argued against my postulate, at just
that point when I was considering the value of further and
so-called 'higher' academic pursuit, and subsequently
decided against it. Just then, I had already been occupied
with the narrative for almost two decades.) It is important
to insist on this formal aspect, since it coincides with the
inclusio, 'the heavens and the earth'. It ratifies
the differential of the categoreal paradigm transcendence :
immanence. The Sabbath belongs formally to the second half
of the story, and resoundingly answers to the second relatum
of the incipient inclusio, 'the heavens and the
earth'. We see the repeated instance of the cipher
four as signifying 'the earth' antithetically to
transcendence, in The Apocalypse. The narrative as a whole
divides in this manner as does the analogous messianic
series. The formulation of its rubrics into pairs demands
recognition of which fact. The seven ordinals which
establish it as a sequence, must be viewed in tandem with
its twofold division, which means that given the unique
status of 'the' Sabbath as not 'a' day of creation as such,
the series is both evenly and unevenly divided into two
halves. The hexameron is explicitly symmetrical, and the
entire sevenfold series is necessarily asymmetrical. This
postulate emphasises the two basic Christian theological
propositions regarding the threefold identities in God, and
simultaneously, their unity. That is, it stresses the
natures of God as transcendent 'and' immanent.
This same mathematical ratio, that is, logos, is
pertinent to the discussion of axiology, because it
permeates the creation narrative, and the discussion of the
judgment of value in human and other than human
consciousnesses. I will argue that this distinction, which
amounts to that of identity : unity, serves the theology of
semiotic forms in its clarification of the two relations;
the relation of God to the world, and the relation of the
world to God. The relation of these same two relations is
coequal with the mutual inclusion of Sabbath 'rest' as Thanatos
and Eucharistic feast as Eros. In other words, there
is a formally propositional, that is, logical
differentiation between the two halves of the creation
narrative, explicitly announced in its initial merism, 'the
heavens and the earth'. This comports with the same
configuration of the messianic series; the Eucharist belongs
to those three miracle stories I refer to as 'Eucharistic';
thus there are in all four 'Eucharistic events', not three.
The equivalent of this ratio 3 : 4, identity : unity, is
applicable to the morphological character of each narrative
sequence; P creation narrative and series of messianic
events.
As propadaeutic to Eucharistic theology,
axiology and epistemology coexist indissolubly. This is the
reason for their conjunction in the P narrative in the form
of God's own repeated judgement of the creation '"And God
saw that it was good.'", in conjunction with the
configuration of the seven rubrics, each according to the
light-time motif, introduced in the narrative of Day 1. A
theology of death qua theology of Sabbath-Eucharist
must include engagement with the two narratives, 'beginning
and end', in their entirety. I will argue that their
hermeneutic entails the distinctive quality of cognitive
over conative intentional modes, such as we see in the J
creation narrative, as preliminary to the messianic series,
along with the theology of 'virtual' immanence in P which
includes the Sabbath-rest rubric.
My intention here is not the detailed
exposition of a full-scale eschatology, though I wish to
insist on the overarching breadth of what is outlined in the
texts. My objective will rather focus on the development of
a coherent and speculative account of the significance of
cognitive forms of intentionality for eschatological
doctrine. This means precisely the relevance that the four
epistemic (or 'cognitive') modes of awareness maintain in
respect of the sanctorum communionem, 'the
communion of saints'. They belong part and parcel to the
idiomatic specificity of the gospels themselves,
indistinguishably from their fourfold soteriological
perspectives. The Sabbath-Eucharist complex can only be
grasped in relation to the doctrine of intentionality as
part of logos theology. And the link between
proximal pasts/proximal futures and the present, just which
occasions of these four various episteme circumscribe, these
multiple occasions of knowing and belief in both orders,
conscious and aconscious, is immediately proper to the
description of the relation between the living and the dead,
forged by the resurrection. Thus my chief concern is the interregnum,
the state between the end of one's earthly existence
and the resurrection from the dead. This interregnum
no less than the present state of the world, is
characterised by the wholly relational character of
human consciousness. This includes consciousness in its most
pesonalized, ontogenic, cast; that of conscious belief and
aconscious belief-in-desire.
There is no such consciousness without actual consciousness of death itself. This puts in part, if it does not answer in whole, the rationale for the existence of death in the first place, contra the Pauline reading of the J creation story. Freud divined the substantial contribution of Eros to human consciousness, but barely scratched the surface of its partner, Thanatos. Ex hypothesi, the 'reason' for death according to the narratives, regardless of any aetiological assumption, is that quintessentially human consciousness itself is mired equally in both psychological realities, Eros and Thanatos, hence, Eucharist and Sabbath. Such awareness, the nexus between death and the twelve categoreal entities which depict the logos as well as human consciousness in its particularity, ensures human communication. And this 'communication' comprises the sanctorum communionem. (The Christological status of the 'first and last' events of the messianic series, Transformation Of Water Into Wine and Transfiguration as marking the corresponding stages of life a propos of this dichotomy, Eros-Thanatos, does not demean the instrumentality of the remaining episodes of the series in the same process; the general trajectory of birth to death, nor their function as markers of equal importance. Each is representative in this respect; each is a type grafted to the integrity of time and mind.) That same human 'reason' or consciousness, also ensures the unity of persons ('identities') in God. In this much, the created order is more than a mere contingency for God.
Sub-human consciousness does not compare to
it in this respect, even granted the evolutionary continuity
of the sub-human and human realms, as well as the allowance
such consciousness makes for the same unity. The exclusivity
of bearing the imago Dei granted to humankind in the
Pneumatological rubric, Day 6, testifies to this fact, in
combination with the axiological strand of the narrative.
Thus if the world itself is the provenance of the unity
of God's threefold identities, that unity in its fullness is
the accomplishment of human consciousness, specifically
found in its realization of the three forms of value, the
true, the good, and the beautiful. These tenets square
immediately with the general fourfold disposition of the
gospel as a mirror of the temporal passage of the
annual cycle, to which the eschatological visions of both
Ezekiel and The Apocalypse advert in symbolic, that is
'archaeoastronomical' form.
My chief purpose here will be to give an
account of the soul - h) yuxh/
- as suggested by the epigraph from Heraclitus. In keeping
with that epigram, many will deem this a fool's errand. My
response is then it must follow that we never say anything
theologically intelligible either of our selves - our
'souls' - or of God. This term, h) yuxh/, is
coterminous with 'mind', 'consciousness', 'self' and other
synonyms, unless otherwise stated. Any account of which
account must reckon with not merely the destiny of the soul,
but necessarily also its origin. Hence the references to
Christ as 'the heavenly bridegroom', 'the Beloved', 'Eros'.
That is, I believe that the Eucharistic forms of
intentionality we first encountered in the J creation story,
conscious desire and knowing, and their aconscious
correlates of virtual immanence, faith-in-desire and
will-to-believe respectively, form just as essential a part
of the same purpose as the Sabbatical modes; those of
conscious will and belief, and their respective correlates
of virtual transcendence, knowledge-of-will and
desire-to-know. The rapport thus sustained by Eucharist and
Sabbath, Eros and Thanatos, not only as
theological narratives, but also as ritual enactment, is
first given in the dominical saying immediately prior to the
first messianic miracle, the promise made to Nathanael by
Jesus that he would see '"... heaven opened, and the angels
of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man."' The
Son of man figures in both messianic Christologies;
initially as 'Eros', and finally as 'Thanatos'.
These portraits must influence any understanding we have of
not just the P creation narrative, but the secondary J story
also. This has dominated 'creation theology' up to the
present day, and to a degree that seems barely intelligible,
to the bulk of which I cannot subscribe. It is as true to
allege sex (Eros) as the cause of death, as it is to
allege death (Thanatos) as the cause of, that is
reason for ('logos') sex. If there is one simple
lesson to be learned from the J story it is this: no
Eros sans Thanatos, but equally no Thanatos sans
Eros. Neither phenomenon is chronologically nor
ontologically prior to the other. They are each both cause
and effect of the other, locked together in im/mortal
embrace.
I do not concern myself with beliefs about
the last judgement, heaven and hell, and the resurrection of
the body from the dead, although these issues certainly
belong to eschatological doctrine. My appointed remit is
precisely what and how we may intelligently conceptualize
consciousness in its relation to death, by which I mean of
course, physical death, the death of the body. This stems
from epistemology qua Christology, first announced
in the Day 1 rubric of the P narrative, where light and
darkness, just as for the beginning of the gospel of John,
are metaphorical constructs intended to convey the same
reality, consciousness, the soul and so on; whichever name
we give to the entirety of categoreal entities set out in
the narrative(s) of 'beginning and end', and their ensuing
intellectual and emotive operations.
1. PAUL ET AL AND THE FALLPaul's Writings are not the products of theological reflection, and can thus not be interpreted theologically. There is no such thing as a theology of Paul, although many New Testament scholars have written theologies "based on" Paul. The letters individually and as a group do not have theological integrity. They are written from out of fundamental religious/pastoral concerns. (Hendrikus Boers, The Problem Of Jews And Gentiles In The Macro-Structure Of Romans, Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok 47, Eisenbrauns, Uppsala, 1982, p 195).
As a community changes, all such rules and canons require revision in the light of reason. The object to be obtained has two aspects; one is the subordination of the community to the individuals composing it, and the other is the subordination of the individuals to the community. Free men obey the rules which they themselves have made. Such rules will be found in general to impose on society behaviour in reference to a symbolism which is taken to refer to the ultimate purposes for which the society exists. It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur:––like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows. (A. N. Whitehead, Symbolism: its Meaning And Effect, Barbour-Page Lectures, University of Virginia, 1927, p 88).One may major in a dizzying variety of departments in our modern multiversities, for example, but attempting synoptic depth in interdisciplinary studies goes against the grain of institutional support, faculty interest and academic reward. It is even taken for granted that interdisciplinarity in principle, cannot be "deep" - thus must be "shallow" and not worthy of respect. Research support for faculty is governed by similar values embodied in analogous grant-controlling institutions, and the system is perpetuated from generation to generation. The refusal of a dominant methodology to recognize its general limitations or to acknowledge the need to advance beyond its familiar mainly successful techniques is what Whitehead calls "obscurantism". Even now the winds of modern obscurantism seem steady and strong. (Frederick Ferré, Being and Value: Toward A Constructive Postmodern Metaphysics, State University Of New York Press, Albany, 1996, p 279).
It is here [in relation to "The Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary"] that the philosopher, as such, parts company with the scholar. The scholar investigates human thought and human achievement, armed with a dictionary. He is the main support of civilized thought. Apart from scholarship, you may be moral, religious, and delightful. But you are not wholly civilized. You will lack the power of delicate accuracy of expression.
It is obvious that the philosopher needs scholarship, just as he needs science. But both science and scholarship are subsidiary weapons for philosophy.
Philosophy is akin to poetry, and both of them seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization. In each case there is reference to form beyond the direct meaning of words. Poetry allies itself to metre, philosophy to mathematic pattern. (Alfred North, Whitehead, Modes Of Thought, Macmillan, The Free Press, 1938, pp171-174).
Christ our passover has been
sacrificed for us:
so let us celebrate the feast,
not with the old leaven of
corruption and wickedness:
but with the unleavened bread of
sincerity and truth. (1 Corinthians 5.7b,8)
Christ once raised from the dead
dies no more:
death has no more dominion over him.
In dying he died to sin once for
all:
in living he lives to God.
See yourselves therefore as dead to
sin:
but alive to God in Jesus Christ our
Lord. (Romans 6.9-11)
Christ has been raised from the
dead:
the first fruits of those who sleep.
For as by man came death:
by man has come also the
resurrection of the dead;
for as in Adam all die:
even so in Christ shall all be made
alive. (1 Corinthians 15.20-22)
The Easter Anthem is
well known to Christians, many who can recite it from memory.
Like the three canticles from the gospel of Luke, it has become
staple fare of liturgical celebration for divergent confessional
stances. And like those canticles, so I will argue, it is art.
Indeed I will characterize Paul's 'theologizing' as a corpus,
generally to be of the same or a similar ilk; that is to say,
rhetorical. My issue is not with the fitness for purpose of art,
or of rhetoric, to theology, nor certainly to liturgy, but with
Paul's literal adoption of the imputation to an individual Adam
(and Eve?) of death stemming from the second creation story
(Genesis 2.4b-3.24):
e)peidh\ ga\r di' ga\r a)nqrw/pou qa/natov, kai\ di ' a)nqrw/pou a)na/stasiv nekrw~n.
w~/sper ga\r e0n tw?~ A)da\m pa/ntev a)poqnh?/skousin, ou(/twv kai\ e)n tw~? Xristw~? pa/ntev zw?opoihqh/sontai. (1 Corinthians 15.21, 22).
I have no argument here with
his vision of the resurrection nor of the central place it must
hold in Christian belief. What most exercises me is the
aetiology of death which
he appropriates wholesale from the second creation story, as
historically veridical and I
am very resolutely choosing my battles in this matter. I will argue that
to take mythopoietic truths for historical verity is to commit a
pathetic fallacy, one that is now more than ever, unsustainable,
and that a more thorough and intelligible, and indeed, more
credible, theology of death is available to us in the gospels
and the Tanakh to which they they too recur. The excess
attention abidingly afforded the J creation narrative and its
result, the continued neglect of the P creation narrative, have
seriously skewed Christian theology, since I take concern with
death as a primary topos of religious consciousness. I will
advocate that both Paul's anthropology and Christology are
called into question by his almost exclusive appeal to the
second creation story, a story which is clearly secondary to the
first.
1 Corinthians
15.21-22 is not the only occasion evincing Paul's literal
reading of the story of 'the Fall' as foundational to his
doctrine of 'recapitulation'
(a)nakefalaiwsiv):
Thus it is written, "The first man Adam became a living being"; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual which is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. (1 Corinthians 15.45-50).
Other segments of Paul's
letters echo the same. His most extended treatment of the notion
is contained in Romans:
Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned - sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type (tu/pov) of the one who was to come.
But the free gift is not like the trespass, for if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the effect of that one man's sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. If, because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.
Then as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man's act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men. For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man's obedience many will be made righteous. Law came in, to increase the trespass; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 5.12-21).
My first purpose shall be to
characterize Paul's 'theologizing' - a term I use in order to
highlight his lack of a systematic approach. I shall rely on the
works of specialist scholars in the field here. I state plainly
at the outset, that I do not find Paul congenial, and that I
believe that the treatment and mistreatment of his writings have
usurped upon the primacy of the gospel, particularly in relation
to the theology of death. I mean of course, the four canonical
gospels of the New Testament. This is less his fault than it is
of those who came after him, and who perhaps unwittingly,
lionized him, because in search of a theology of the New
Testament. They begin notably dogmatically with Augustine, and
continue until, and comprising, the second wave of the
Reformation, that is, including the Reformed tradition springing
from Calvin, and beyond. One
of the earliest, and certainly the most outspoken of modern
exegetes to draw attention to the character of Paul's
theological approach is William Wrede. He is unsparing in his
criticism as the following demonstrates:
His status in his own communities was nevertheless that of a master. He was accustomed to carry out his own will and force it upon others, he laid claim to the authority of an apostle, as always right, and ready to show his rough side to the less docile members. Such a man naturally gains crowds of reverent admirers, and devoted secretaries, eager to serve him, but he repels and alienates those who do not like coercion. (William Wrede, Paul, English translation by Edward Lummis, Phillip Green, London 1907, pp 37, 38.)
When we call Paul a theologian we must expressly exclude modern associations of the word. He possessed no theological learning in our sense, and has very little affinity with our dogmatic and ethical writers. He never attempts - not even in the letter to the Romans - to unfold a system of doctrine. He writes always as a missionary, an organizer, a speaker to the people, is guided in the setting forth of his thoughts by the occasion given, and treats only of particular sides of his subject. We might well doubt, therefore, whether 'theology' is here the right word to use: but it cannot be avoided. (Ibid p 76).
Commenting on the passage
in Romans 5, Wrede writes:
It is easy to see that his ways of thought are somewhat elastic. Certain main lines remain unalterable; for the rest, the thought wavers and alters with heedless freedom from one letter to another, even from chapter to chapter, without the slightest regard for logical consistency in details. His points of view and leading premisses change and traverse each other without his perceiving it. It is no great feat to unearth contradictions, even among his leading thoughts. Here we read: the Gentiles have also a law in their conscience, by which they can be guided; and soon afterwards: from Adam to Moses sin cannot be imputed to mankind, for there was then no law. When the second thought occurred to Paul, he had clearly forgotten the first. Or again, by the side of the thought that man is not justified by works, but by faith, we find the other thought that in the judgment men will be dealt with according to their works. Tortured attempts to reconcile these opposites are in all such cases mischievous. It is also dangerous, however, to hold that Paul could not have meant a thing, because it leads to impossible consequences. The consequences may be 'impossible', but did Paul perceive them? We may perhaps find instruction in the very fact that he did not.
This fragmentary style of thinking is partly a result of the rabbinical schooling. Among the rabbis all discussions start from isolated scripture texts, or particular problems. The thought moves from case to case, without any feeling for the systematic connexion of the whole. (Ibid pp 77, 78).
The employment of scripture, however, as a book of oracles is, from a theological point of view, more important. In this practice again Paul stands upon the shoulders of his teachers but he, and indeed the Christians generally, made a very considerable advance in it. The tendency to find oracles in the Old Testament grew enormously, and everything now referred, as their views necessitated, to Jesus and the end of the world. The principle behind all this is, 'whatever was written was written for our sake'. The Old Testament is turned by such treatment more and more into a Christian book. (Ibid pp 79, 80).
A great part is played in this theology by the thought that what happens to the first of an historical series happens in consequence to the whole series. Adam is the headspring of humanity. He represents the whole race of mankind. What is true of him is therefore true of all that are connected with him. Since he dies, all who belong to his race also die. Christ is again the first of a series. Therefore, since he arises from the dead, all rise with him - simply on that account. In one place Paul formulates the law quite definitely: 'As the earthly (Adam) is, so are they that are earthly, and as the heavenly (Christ) is, so are they that are heavenly.' (Ibid p 81).
We for our part can see no reason whatever for such deductions from the leader of a line to those that follow him. We ask at once for a connexion to be established. Why and how has the experience of Adam or of Christ such an effect on other men? For Paul, on the other hand, the matter is one of immediate evidence. He assumes an undefinable coherence between the race and the individual and he sees in their history a parallelism which simply could not but be so. In other words, he thinks under a law which does not obtain for us. (Ibid p 82).
Wrede adds a footnote
concerning Paul's evident elision of the concepts of the race
and the individual Adam:
This is most clear in the case of Christ, because here all ideas of heredity are excluded.
Innumerable problems arise from
Paul's willingness, not only to accept at face value the second
creation story regarding the aetiology of death. It is equally
problematic to see the narrative's focus as 'Adam' - I shall
argue that it should be Eve - and then to fail to discriminate
between a singular being, Adam, and the human race as a whole.
Indeed such a manoeuvre solves certain problems for him. It
answers in part at least, the question of the relation of the
two canons, first, Tanakh, to last, the New Testament. That is,
it ostensibly contextualizes his Christology and soteriology in
relation to the doctrine of creation, although this is combined
with the Exodus tradition. The
Easter hymn, consisting of compiled texts from two of his
letters, itself melds Paul's theology of death with yet another
narrative from the Tanakh, as noted, by means of references to
the 'sacrificed' (e0tu/qh) 'paschal
lamb' (to\ pa/sxa).
The Pauline Christology of recapitulation
might serve thus to affiliate creation and salvation, if we
could regard Paul as a systematic theologian. But can we? Here
'context' is in fact a key term in more than one way, for I will
agree with 'contextual' readings of Paul that the impetus behind
his Christology should be viewed in terms of needs arising from
its pastoral settings; and that its primary 'theological'
function is to meet specific conditions incumbent on his
pastoral guidance irrespectively of any theological procedure
that could be considered systematic.
We do not begin with a doctrine of God. The most characteristic utterance of Paul about God is just this, that he sent Christ for the salvation of men. That is to say, the whole Pauline doctrine is a doctrine of Christ and his work; that is its essence.
These two, the person and the work of Christ, are inseparable. The apostle had not reached a conception of Christ as a detached object of doctrine, which may be considered without reference to his significance for the world. Paul's essential thought of him is simply this, that he is the redeemer. But with this proviso the utterances about Christ may still to a certain extent be detached from the whole. We shall make the attempt, because it helps us better to understand them, and also because Paul's Christology has attained such a remarkable historical importance. (Ibid pp 85, 86).
The best known of Paul's ideas, the so-called doctrine of justification by faith, has not yet been mentioned. Our silence in itself implies a judgment. The Reformation has accustomed us to look upon this as the central point of Pauline doctrine : but it is not so. In fact the whole Pauline religion can be expounded without a word being said about this doctrine, unless it be in the part devoted to the Law. It would be extraordinary if what was intended to be the chief doctrine were referred to only in a minority of the epistles. That is the case with this doctrine : it only appears where Paul is dealing with the strife against Judaism. And this fact indicates the real significance of the doctrine. It is the polemical doctrine of Paul, is only made intelligible by the struggle of his life, his controversy with Judaism and Jewish Christianity, and is only intended for this. So far, indeed, it is of high historical importance, and characteristic of the man. (Ibid p 122, 123).
The question, then, of the meaning of the death of Christ occurs once more. It cannot be denied that Paul interpreted it by means of sacrificial ideas, especially that of the sin-offering. That does not however in itself prove more than that the effect which, according to Jewish opinion, the blood of the victim possessed, is assigned - without any more detailed analogy coming into consideration - to the blood of Christ. His death is taken to be the death of a sacrifice; it has therefore the same virtue as the sacrifice, namely the expiation or remission of sins; that is, it confers righteousness on man. (Ibid pp 132, 133).
Paul had a theology already when he became a Christian. He was naturally unable to fling it away like a worn out cloak. The new way of regarding things which his conversion brought might indeed recast the old, but must necessarily take up a good part of it into itself. A new religion only engenders new ideas when, and so far as, it presents new religious realities. In faith in Jesus there were two, and only two new realities Jesus himself, with his life, and the community. These shaped the original Christian thoughts, and are certainly the decisive realities ; but, being so few, they disappear before the Jewish ideas which merge into them or grow up unchanged by their side.
It can be definitely shown that a great Jewish heritage remains in the Pauline thought-world. It is indeed by no means unintelligible that Paul de Lagarde actually called this opponent of Judaism the most Jewish of all the apostles. As an educated theologian he possessed an especial wealth of clearly stamped Jewish ideas. Without too great trouble a tolerably comprehensive Jewish theology could be put together out of his letters; the Jewish parallels would be easy to supply. (Ibid pp 138, 139).
All is Jewish, from the judgment with its wrath and retribution to the great 'oppression' before the end, to the 'blast of the last trumpet,' to the victory of Messiah over the hostile spirits. Christ alone stands in a new way in the centre of the picture; and yet in the old way too, for the Jewish Messiah had also his own place in the representation of the future.
Another group of thoughts is concerned with man. Paul's ethical pessimism is rooted in Judaism. The universality of sin and the 'evil heart' of man are known to the Jewish apocalyptic books - even if they make some few exceptions. They know too the devastating effects of the sin of Adam. From him the 'abiding weakness' in mankind derives its origin; his fall is the fall of all men. In this way even the thought of Christ as the representative of the new humanity was half prefigured. What Jew would have found anything new in the idea that death is the consequence and wages of sin? It is a very irony that all such specifically Jewish ideas are to-day widely regarded as 'specifically Christian.' (Ibid pp 140, 141).
Belief in the death and resurrection of Christ is far from implying the necessity of doing away with circumcision and other rites, especially as Christ, in Paul's belief, had himself kept the Law. As we have already intimated (pp. 124 sq.), this doctrine had its immediate origin in the exigencies of Paul's mission to the Gentiles. It furnished the theoretical support for emancipation from Jewish institutions. In this case theory was the child, not the parent, of practice, even though the practice itself presupposes a depreciation of the institutions in question. Where Paul sets faith up in direct antithesis to these institutions he is dealing with the practical question, what makes a man a Christian. His rejection of the whole Law, as the embodiment of the principle of works, was no doubt a later development. (Ibid pp 146, 147).
It follows then conclusively from all this that Paul is to be regarded as the second founder of Christianity. As a rule even liberal theology shrinks from this conclusion. Tertullian, Origen, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury, Luther, Calvin, Zinzendorf - not one of these great teachers can be understood on the ground of the preaching and historic personality of Jesus; their Christianity cannot be comprehended as a remodelling of 'the gospel'; the key to their comprehension, though of course sundry links stand between, is Paul. The back-bone of Christianity for all of them was the history of salvation; they lived for that which they shared with Paul. This second founder of Christianity has even, compared with the first, exercised beyond all doubt the stronger - not the better influence. True, he has not lorded it everywhere, especially not in the life of simple, practical piety, but throughout long stretches of church history one need but think of the Councils and dogmatic contests - he has thrust that greater person, whom he meant only to serve, utterly into the background. (Ibid pp 179, 180).
Jesus or Paul: this alternative characterizes, at least in part, the religious and theological warfare of the present day. The older school of belief is no doubt convinced that with Paul it enters, for the first time, into possession of the whole and genuine Jesus; and it is also able, to a certain extent, to take up the historical Jesus into its Pauline Christ. Still, this Christ must needs for the most part crush out the man Jesus. On the other hand, even the 'modern theology' is not willing to forsake Paul. Paul is rich enough to afford them precious thoughts, such as they can make entirely their own. It finds especially congenial Paul's fight against the Law, although the 'protestant' element in that contest is readily over-estimated. But in Paul's own mind all this, without the kernel of his Christology, is nothing, and no honour paid to the great personality can compensate for the surrender of this kernel. As a whole Paul belongs absolutely to ecclesiastical orthodoxy, whether it preserves his views quite faithfully in matters of detail or not. (Ibid pp 181, 182).
Many contemporary commentators
support the general thrust of Wrede's claims and seek a
less doctrinaire reading of Paul. An example is Dale B. Martin's
online course, Introduction
To The New Testament History And Literature, Lecture 16,
Paul As Jewish Theologian:
He writes to the Romans partly because he’s going to Spain and he wants to prepare the ground for a trip to Rome and to Spain, but also he goes so carefully to explain what he really believes about the law and justification, because I think, he’s afraid of what may happen in Jerusalem. He’s, in a sense, trying to get the Roman Christians on his side before his trip to Jerusalem. ...
... the traditional interpretation of Romans was that this was Paul’s theological treatise. It didn’t have much of anything to do with the circumstances. Paul just kind of decided he was going to Rome, so he sits down and he says, what’s really my Gospel in 16 chapters? He writes it up; he sends it to the churches in Rome to present my Gospel to them. This is sort of a theological treatise, and the main point of the treatise is: you’re not justified by works of law, by any works no matter which law, you’re justified by grace through faith alone.
The big Protestant, the Lutheran, the Calvinist reading of Romans set Romans as the center book of the Bible, and it’s thought that what it’s mainly about is individual salvation, your personal salvation. You need to recognize that you won’t be saved by your works, by anything you do. Not only you’re not saved by Jewish law; you’re not saved by Roman Catholic rules, you’re not saved by any law, you’re saved by putting your faith in Jesus, accepting Jesus as your Lord and personal Savior, or something like that. It’s individual salvation, and it’s a doctrine of individual salvation by faith that’s the reason Paul wrote Romans. And that’s what its central message is: very individualistic, very doctrinal, very theological.
That reading of Romans has been severely challenged in the last forty years or so. Now people are starting to say it’s not the first few chapters of Romans that constitute the most important part of Romans, which has always been the Protestant interpretation, because that’s where Paul talks doctrinally about justification by faith. Scholars have said now, look to the end of Romans, chapter 9-11 the latter part of Romans, that’s where you’ll see what the real point of Romans is, and it’s not about individual salvation. ...
Paul is not about starting a new religion. There’s no “Christianity” in Paul. There are no “Christians” in Paul’s letters. You can’t find the word. You can’t find the concept. There’s no “Christianity” or “Christians” in Paul’s world. He believed that he was the Apostle to the Gentiles to bring them into Israel to make the Gentiles part of Israel. Then, as he says right here, most wildly along he somehow believes, although he doesn’t tell us how it’s going to happen, that somehow God and God’s miraculous mercy is going to figure out a way in the end to even bring all of Israel back in also. All Israel, he says, will be saved. Paul’s not necessarily the first Christian theologian. He’s one of the most radical Jewish theologians in the ancient world. (loc. cit. 41.08 et. seq.).
Similarly:
In sum, Paul’s sense of his status as an apostle of the risen Christ was absolutely central to his self-understanding. That awareness imbued his mission with a sense of cosmic significance and gave it such a profound urgency that his message spread like a prairie grass fire across Asia Minor into Thrace, Macedonia, and Achaia and reached out toward Spain, the western edge of the known world. As an emissary of Christ Paul claimed the power to pronounce judgment and announce salvation to outsiders. His identification with his Lord was so absolute that the lines sometimes seemed to blur between his pronouncements and those of Christ (e.g., 1 Cor. 16:22), and he derived great strength from and even felt pride in the scars left on his body that resembled those inflicted on Christ at his crucifixion (Gal. 6:17). Calvin, J. Roetzel, Paul: The Man And The Myth, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 1998, pp 67, 68.)
The modern reader’s desire to find or create closure in a narrative, whether fictional or historical, influences the reading of ancient texts like the Pauline letters. Since Romans was Paul’s last letter and since it does include some of Paul’s most profound or some would say unsurpassed theological insight, that tendency would appear to be not only natural but correct. Yet the risk of such a reading of Paul is obvious. For once Romans is established as the goal and quintessential expression of Paul’s theology, then every other letter of Paul can be read as a preliminary or provisional statement of a Pauline theology that receives its most adequate expression in Romans. This letter then becomes the canon of Paul’s mature theology. But surely when Paul was in the thick of things he would hardly have viewed his literary activity in the same way. When he wrote Romans he could see difficulty ahead in Jerusalem, but his mind raced westward to Rome and beyond to Spain. He clearly did not know that Romans would be his last letter, and it is even possible that it was not. Judging from the flurry of literary activity in the two or three years before Romans was written, it is hardly wild speculation to suspect that after his arraignment in Jerusalem and his imprisonment in Rome he wrote other letters. (Ibid p 92.)
Nevertheless, Romans is a genuine letter written for a real situation. It has the form of a letter, the warmth and affection of a letter, and the concreteness of a letter. It deals with the relationship of the “weak” and the “strong,” with charges against Paul and his gospel, and with support Paul sought for his mission to Spain. While we hear echoes of other letters in Romans, for example, Adam and Christ, charismatic gifts, law, Abraham, the church as Christ’s body, and the love commandment, this letter is no calm summing up of the theological wisdom Paul had garnered throughout his life. Its lack of any reference to the cross, any mention of the trials that authenticate the integrity of his apostleship, or any discussion of the Eucharist disqualifies Romans as a simple compendium of Paul’s theology. Moreover, even when Paul does recall earlier motifs he almost always changes their application. (Ibid p 121.)
Johan Christiaan Beker places
the approach to the 'catholic' Paul historically within the
setting of the rise to prominence of scripture at the time of
the Reformation:
We must be aware how profoundly the portrait of this “catholic” Paul has influenced the interpretation of the apostle throughout the course of church history. Indeed, the creation of this “catholic” Paul became a great stumbling block in the recovery of the historical Paul. For the Paul who was accepted in the canon was actually a synthetic Paul, a mixture composed from his letters, from the post-Pauline writings, and from legendary stories based on oral tradition. And even after the Reformation rediscovered the “original” Paul for the church and its theology, it never questioned the harmonious witness that Paul and (most of) the other New Testament witnesses supposedly shared.
Moreover, the insistence of the Reformation on the doctrinal unity and all-sufficiency of Scripture in its struggle against the Roman Catholic doctrine of the coequality of Scripture and tradition finally obscured the particularity of Paul’s gospel and his hermeneutic: Protestant orthodoxy simply transmitted the catholic Paul of the New Testament canon as doctrinal authority for the church.
Henceforth the search for the substance and center of Paul’s thought became a search for its timeless dogmatic truth. This process continued basically until the rise of historical-critical scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see J. S. Semler; F. C. Baur). In other words, the portrait of Paul as a dogmatic theologian won the day, while his letters became proof texts to undergird Protestant doctrine. Thus, whatever empathy the framers of the canon deserve for their attempt to solve the “Pauline problem,” their adaptation of Paul was fatally flawed. (Johan, Christiaan Beker, Heirs Of Paul: Paul's Legacy In the New Testament, And In The Church Today, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1991, pp 33, 34.)
However, it is my contention that the reception of Paul by his New Testament interpreters has great importance for the church today. Since the church accords canonical status not only to Paul’s authentic letters but also to the letters of his apostolic pupils in the New Testament, they constitute together an essential part of the written word of God in Scripture, which we confess to be the normative source of Christian life and doctrine (see, for instance, the 1967 Confession of the Presbyterian Church in the USA: "Scripture is the Word of God written”). In other words, these writings do not comprise an archaeological deposit but are confessed to convey the power of the gospel ever anew to different times and circumstances.
However, if Scripture in fact has this authority, a serious problem difficult to resolve confronts us. How, for example, do we draw the line between the abiding-normative elements of Paul’s gospel and its contingent, time-bound elements? Indeed, when we endeavor to interpret Paul to our churches today we somehow realize that it is impossible to bestow authoritative status on all of his pronouncements. We realize that his statements about marriage, sex, homosexuality, women, slaves, and so on seem so culturally determined and dated that they can hardly qualify as an abiding word of God.
To be sure, the delineation between the abiding coherence of Paul’s gospel and its contingent elements often involves us necessarily in subjective judgments because what is contingent for one interpreter is frequently an inherent part of the coherence of the gospel for another. However, we must realize that a catalytic hermeneutic of Paul’s gospel can deal with these problems more successfully than a literalistic hermeneutic. For whereas a catalytic hermeneutic acknowledges the necessity of having to distinguish between the abiding or coherent elements of Paul’s gospel and its time-conditioned interpretations, a literalistic hermeneutic does not draw such a distinction, but rather ascribes normative authority in a simplistic, anachronistic manner to all of Paul’s statements.
Even apart from such specific hermeneutical concerns, today’s preachers and teachers must deal with a much more burdensome problem. Indeed, a large-scale alienation from Paul's gospel coupled with a widespread dislike for the person of Paul seem to prevail in our churches. Karl Barth’s talk of the “Strange New World within the Bible” seems to have become so true for many of us with respect to Paul that he actually no longer concerns us. I ascribe this estrangement from Paul not only to this dislike for his temperamental and high-strung personality, but especially to the difficulty we have in appropriating his gospel, i.e., in experiencing its relevance for our lives today. Indeed, it is simply quite difficult for people today to relate either to Paul’s message or to his person. In fact, we all too often seem to exchange one annoyance for another: We attribute the unintelligibility of Paul’s message to the unpleasant impression that his person evokes in us, or, conversely, we dislike Paul’s personality so intensely that we refuse to pay attention to his message. (Ibid pp 99-101.)
Thus when mainline Protestant churches believe that the authority of Paul’s gospel consists in the literal reproduction of its wording and conceptuality, they in fact substitute transliteration for adaptation. Such a procedure reifies Paul’s language and treats his gospel as a frozen, eternally valid, dogmatic deposit. It imposes on the church a collage of Paul’s statements, which come across as objects from outer space since the basic historicity of Paul’s language is here ignored. Since Paul’s formulations here constitute an indelible part of an infallible canon, their truly “biblical” status stipulates their uncontestable authority. (Ibid p 120.)
Other examples could
easily be added to these. But as far as I know, the central
concern of this essay, which is the 'theology' of recapitulation
we encounter in both Romans and 1 Corinthians, lays outside of
their purview. This sees Adam as the central player in the drama
of the Fall. Are to we assume then, that this personal name
covers both male and female, and both the individual and the
collective? Does it follow from the creation of Eve from Adam's
'side', according to the J narrative, that we understand Eve,
and so womankind in general, thereby sublated by the same means?
Might this indeed be how Paul himself saw it?
Robin Scroggs is an example of dissatisfaction with,
though not total dissension from, the contextual turn in Pauline
scholarship. In his essay, Paul
And The Eschatological Woman, he addresses Paul's view of
women, avowing that Paul, represents the vanguard of their
liberation from subordination by men in the New Testament.
Nevertheless he appeals to 'the total context' of the relevant
passages, and 'the general sociological conditions in the
Mediterranean world of Paul's day' to bolster his argument, and
furthermore makes no effort to deny his own situation within the
same theological trend:
It is time, indeed past time, to say loudly and clearly that Paul is, so far from being a chauvinist, the only certain and consistent spokesman for the liberation and equality of women in the New Testament, although, as we shall see, he probably inherited this affirmation of equality from the earliest church. This is by no means a novel interpretation of the apostle's views; recent work, not surprisingly done in part by scholars who are women, has been moving in that direction. Basing itself upon this work, the present essay attempts to pursue further the logic of Paul's position and to make as complete an evaluation as possible. (Robin Scroggs, The Text And The Times: New Testament Essays For Today, Fortress press, Minneapolis, 1992, p 70.)
To determine just what was the real Paul's view of women is considerably more difficult. There are two basic reasons. One - which may seem surprising in view of the recent hue and cry - is that Paul does not seem to consider the place of women as a problem. Only in 1 Corinthians does he address himself specifically to problems related to women, and this because of the scene at Corinth, which has elicited some questions by the Corinthians themselves. The other genuine letters can be searched diligently, but all that can be harvested is the rhetorical and passing comment in Gal. 3:28, which probably is a fragment of a baptismal formula, and a few greetings to women who had been fellow workers with Paul. The second difficulty is that adequate exegesis of relevant passages must take serious account of the total context, Paul's theological position, the general sociological conditions in the Mediterranean world of Paul's day, and the particular finiteness of the apostle. This will necessitate ending rather than beginning with the problems raised in 1 Corinthians 7 and 11, but that is the only way to provide the correct perspective. (Ibid pp 71,72.)
Clearly Scroggs is unimpressed
by certain 'contextualisms'. He devotes an essay to the theme in
this collection:
In recent decades, however, new forms of contextualizations have emerged that do pose a threat, and it is these forms we must face honestly if we are to perceive the dangers to the very foundation of coherent theological reconstructions. Broadly speaking, most of these can be subsumed under one umbrella term, that of sociocultural realities - by which I do not mean primarily the social history of the church communities (although this is not to be excluded) but rather the broader civilization in which those communities were placed. Questions that were suppressed in the interest of the history of ideas have become uppermost. How do the authors of texts and the communities for which they write relate to the social stratification out of which they live their lives? What do economic realities and dynamics have to say to the comprehension of our texts? How does the political situation inform the author and community? What do various family structures and social mores say about the judgments the authors make in their texts? Questions about the psychological dynamics of an author or a text have also been raised. Literary and rhetorical conventions are suggested as the explanation of some of the conceptual statements and structures in texts. (Ibid pp 214, 215.)
Yet the critics of these contextualizations have due cause for their alarm. If these approaches carry the day. New Testament theology can no longer have the pristine purity it once enjoyed. The validity of an abstract decontextualizing synthesis is increasingly suspect and its form seen as naive. If what Paul, for example, says is so embedded in the political and social realities of his day, how is it any longer possible to view his theological statements independently of those contexts since they are, in part, a response to those situations? Can his theology be extracted from those contextualizations either to allow a coherent reconstruction of a theological position to be made, or to permit a hearing in our own day of his theological perspective? (Ibid pp 216, 216, original emphasis).
In his treatment of Paul's
recapitulation of the J creation narrative in his letter to the
Corinthian church, one may wonder that he hasn't dodged a bullet
in asserting that 'A review of Pauline theology is both
unnecessary and out of place here.' (p 72.) Commenting on 1
Corinthians 11.2-16 he appends a footnote to verse 4:
Paul does not say woman is the image of man, since Genesis 1 says she is the image of God. In Jewish reflection on the creation myths, the idea of doxa was prominent, being ascribed to Adam as the revelation of God. While in this reflection doxa and eikōn are closely associated, they do have different nuances. This explains why Paul brings in doxa with eikōn in verse 7a and why he drops eikōn in 7b. As Barrett comments, "In this context, Paul values the term image only as leading to the term glory" (Commentary, 252). For a discussion of Jewish uses of these terms in the creation myths, see Scroggs, Last Adam, 23-29, 47-49. (Ibid p 90, original emphasis.)
This essay, Paul And The
Eschatological Woman, is one of very few instances where a
scholar even mentions Eve in relation to Pauline recapitulation
theology; even then, notably, it is confined to a footnote. One
can thus only wonder how it was that the second creation story
was seized upon by an exclusively male 'scholastic' elite to
justify ideological trends which centred on the derogation of
not just women, but the body itself, beginning with Paul. The
'eschatological woman' of the essay's title would have been more
fittingly apt for an examination of the vision contained in
Apocalypse 12, which I will argue appropriates the drama of the
J creation narrative, as well as the P story, in ways that
are eminently more theologically defensible than Paul's usage of
the same, and this because they respect the inherent theologies
of both creation stories which consist in essential
juxtaposition. That juxtaposition is immediately visible in
terms of highly contrastive outlooks; I do not mean simply that
the first is positive and the second negative; I mean rather
that the governing intention of the P narrative is a theology of
transcendence, whereas that of J is an embryonic theology of
immanence. Embryonic, because in general terms, this same
dichotomy fits the differential establishing the relation of the
two testaments, as announced at the inception of the
literature as
a whole, by the merism 'the heavens and the earth'. Why
could Paul have not seen as much, exposes an attitude towards
the Tanakh which is expedient if not exactly cavalier. His
evident, preferential avoidance of the first creation narrative
is revealing in respect of his own general outlook and his
'theological method'.
Scripture itself resolutely attests to this theological
difference between the two creation narratives. Not only by its
unmistakably prominent alteration of the names of God; but also
by the pronounced inversion of the previous inclusio,
'the heavens and the earth', at the beginning of the second
narrative; and equally by the recurrent leitmotif of the
human-(couple?)-earth-ground, the paronomasia Adam-adamah. These
are evidence of a manifest change in perspective. From Genesis
1.1 ( את השמים ואת הארץ) and 2.1 ( השמים
והארץ, LXX τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν
γῆν) until 2.4a
the inclusio functions in its
initial form. Then, at 2.4b it is reformulated as 'the earth and the heavens'
signalling the opening of the ensuing J story.
The P narrative concedes rank to transcendence in virtue of
'heaven(s)' being the 'beginning' term, that is, the first term
in the story of 'the beginning'. So too in 2.4a (אלה תולדות השמים והארץ) we
encounter the final occurrence of the inclusio.
But in this very same verse, at 2.4b, the seam between the two
variant accounts, we notice a dramatic shift, legitimately
rendered in the NET Bible and NIV Bible for example, as 'the
earth and the heavens' ( ארץ
ושמים). And no longer is the Creator referred to as
'Elohim' ( אלהים),
that is, 'God', as for the first narrative. The Creator in the
J narrative is now 'the Lord God' ( יהוה
אלהים). (The Septuagint fails to maintain the shift
from 'the heavens and the earth' to 'the earth and the
heavens' at 2.4a-4bff, nevertheless it does observe the clear
distinction between the two names for the deity: ὁ θεός and Κύριος ὁ θεὸς.) We note in connection with this
predilection of the first story for transcendence, that the three
rubrics of the second half seemingly pay homage to the first.
The rubrics Day 1, 2 and 3 announce those three fiats
which are established as precedents for the latter
course of events. In other words, the three first rubrics are
the prior models determining the ensuing three. Even though the
creation of the actual earth-dry land takes place during this
half of the six Days, the series divides according to the
meristic inclusio such that the first
section answers to 'the heavens' and the second to 'the earth'.
The placement of the merism-inclusio at the beginning
and end of the complete sevenfold series ensures this.
The second, and secondary creation narrative then, differs
markedly from the first. Upon entering its setting we are no
longer in the realms of the abstract, of numbered units, of
forms of antithesis, of the primacy of the heavenly; we are
transposed immediately to the mundane, to an earthly realm in
which even God himself appears on earth, and speaks with the
human couple. The story is often known as 'The Garden of Eden'; it
describes Adam as per the etymology of that name, as having been
formed from the dust; the serpent too is part of the same
schematic concentration on the earthly as opposed to the
heavenly, since it is confined to the dust. I have characterized
it as an embryonic theology of
immanence, and thus secondary in importance, for like the second
half of the P narrative, it effectively awaits the final
dispensation, the doctrine of immanence which only the gospels
can and do deliver. That is, as we see from the motif of
consumption in the J narrative, like the same thematic construct
in the latter section of the first narrative, it defers to the
theology contained in the messianic series, the three
Eucharistic miracles in particular, as well as the actual
Eucharist itself of course. In other words, without the final,
actual theology of immanence which is the business of the
messianic series, the creation narratives as a whole are no more
than a beginning without an end. Both the J account, and the
second part of the P narrative are proleptic in this regard. The
interdependence of the two narrative sequences, Genesis 1.1-2.4a
and messianic series is thus reciprocal. The two texts require
each other. Neither is intelligible nor comprehensive without
the other. Their mutual inclusivity is one of several
justifications of the Trinitarian hermeneutic of the P
narrative.
The rubric concerning the earth and sea, that of Day 3, as
belonging to the theology of transcendence, the first half of
the P narrative, does not contradict this fact. Just as the
'heavens' rubric, Day 2 has a corresponding form of 'virtual
immanence', Day 6 has a corresponding form of (pure)
transcendence, the Day 3 rubric. The text is nuanced and
sophisticated in this respect. Indeed not only does the final
figure of the merism, 'earth', anticipate the gospels, which
account for the same, that is, for immanence, with the same
authority as does the story of beginning account for
transcendence ('the heavens'); the extensive reach or
referential trajectory of this marker includes The Apocalypse.
It is there that we find the two beasts; one from the earth, the
other from the sea, in accordance with the way in which these
same figures are used in that text, the story of Day 3. I have
argued that their recurrence in The Apocalypse as ciphers for
the masculine ('from the sea') and feminine ('from the
earth') forms of archetypal
evil recurs not only to this Pneumatological creation rubric -
in just which connection we note the creation of male and female
humans during Day 6, the rubric paired with Day 3 according to
the logical structure of the text - but that they ultimately
revert to the description of the state antecedent to the
creation (Genesis 1.2), which mentions both ciphers: the watery
deep, and the formless earth. (The details of this hermeneutic
can be found at this site.)
In no way then, am I contesting the evil that men, and women do
- the topos of the J narrative. Rather I am presenting as the
most significant intertextual and biblical theology that we
have at our disposal the certain co-ordination of the two
series, creation and messianic. Nor does that systematic
relationship of the gospels to the first creation story end
there. It also encompasses The Apocalypse. That is the reason
why we find the same utilization of serial form and numerical
references in all three scriptures. The series of seven seals (Apocalypse
6.1-7.17) is the final theological summation of the co-extensive
relation between the seven archeological and seven teleological
events; the first story of creation and the messianic series;
the theologies of creation and salvation.
This far-reaching rapport maintained by the second creation
narrative and The Apocalypse is immediately recognizable in the
central vision of the latter, of the transfigured woman depicted
in chapter 12. This too effects the same forward thrust of the
theology of immanence. That is, it too suggests that the
portrait of the human couple and the story of 'the Fall', should
yield to the theological disclosures of the same final member of
the canon as a whole of which they are in no uncertain sense,
precursive. My purpose here however is restricted necessarily to
examining and assessing the contributions which those two
analogous narratives have yet to make to Christian theology in
the third millennium. In sum, rather than 'the Fall and
salvation', I am concerned to address 'creation and salvation'
which I see as the more general typification of the two canons.
Returning to the somewhat odd elision of Eve with Adam as the
suppressed premise of Pauline anakephalaiosis,
Elaine Pagels drew attention to Paul's use or misuse of the
second creation narrative to reduce the status of women
generally to one of subordination to that of men.
Paul himself, some twenty years after Jesus' death, urged an even more austere discipline upon his followers than Jesus had preached. Although Paul acknowledged that marriage was not sin (1 Corinthians 7:3), he encouraged those who were able to renounce it to do so. Paul invoked the creation account to urge Christians to avoid prostitution (1 Corinthians 6:15-20), and later to argue that women must veil their heads in church, apparently to acknowledge their subordination to men as a kind of divine order given in nature ("For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man," 1 Corinthians 11:3-16). In the generations following Paul, Christians fiercely debated what the apostle meant. Some insisted that only those who "undo the sin of Adam and Eve" by practicing celibacy - even within marriage - can truly practice the gospel. Others, who were to predominate within the majority of churches, rejected such austerity and composed, in Paul's name, other letters, later incorporated into the New Testament as if Paul himself had written them, which used the story of Adam and Eve to support traditional marriage and to prove that women, being naturally gullible, are unfit for any role but raising children and keeping house (see, for example, 1 Timothy 2:11-15); thus the story of Eden was made to reinforce the patriarchal structure of community life. (Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, And The Serpent, Random House, New York, 1988, p xxii.)
Furthermore, Augustine read back into Paul's letters his own teaching of the moral impotence of the human will, along with his sexualized interpretation of sin. (Ibid p xxvi.)
Taking his cue from Paul's saying that "the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband" (I Corinthians 11:3), the author of Ephesians explains that since the man, like Christ, is the head, and the woman his body, "so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies," and wives, in turn, should submit to the higher judgment of their husbands, as their "heads" (Ephesians 5:28-33.) (Ibid p 25.)
Within thirty to fifty years of Paul's death, then, partisans of the ascetic Jesus - and of the ascetic Paul - were contending against those who advocated a much more moderate Jesus and a much more conservative Paul. Like relatives in a large family battling over the inheritance, both ascetic and nonascetic Christians laid claim to the legacies of Jesus and Paul, both sides insisting that they alone were the true heirs. (Ibid p 25.)
Augustine not only read into the message of Jesus and Paul his own aversion to "the flesh," but also claimed to find in Genesis his theory of original sin. In his final battle against the Pelagians, Augustine succeeded in persuading many bishops and several Christian emperors to help drive out of the churches as "heretics" those who held to earlier traditions of Christian freedom. From the fifth century on, Augustine's pessimistic views of sexuality, politics, and human nature would become the dominant influence on western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, and color all western culture, Christian or not, ever since. Thus Adam, Eve, and the serpent - our ancestral story - would continue, often in some version of its Augustinian form, to affect our lives to the present day. (Ibid p 150.)
Augustine concludes that not only are we helpless in infancy, and defenseless against sexual passion, but we are equally helpless in the face of death. We die; therefore we must be guilty of sin. For if we are not all sinners, then God is unjust to let us all die alike, even infants prematurely born, who have had no opportunity to sin. (Ibid p 141.)
But according to Julian, here, too, Augustine confuses physiology with morality. Death is not a punishment for sin but a natural process, like sexual arousal and labor pains, natural, necessary, and universal for all living species. Such processes have nothing to do with human choice - and nothing to do with sin:
Whatever is natural is shown not to be voluntary. If [death] is natural, it is not voluntary. If voluntary, it is not natural. These two, by definition, are opposites, like necessity and will . . . The two cannot exist simultaneously; they cancel each other out. (Ibid p 142.)
If Julian's argument looks simple - merely common sense - that simplicity is deceptive. In fact, it presupposes a Copernican revolution in religious perspective. That we suffer and die does not mean that we participate in guilt - neither Adam's guilt nor our own. That we suffer and die shows only that we are, by nature (and indeed, Julian would add, by divine intent), mortal beings, simply one living species among others. Arguing against the penal interpretation of death, Julian says, "If you say it is a matter of will, it does not belong to nature; if it is a matter of nature, it has nothing to do with guilt. (Ibid p 144, emphasis original.)
A raft of contemporary,
scholarly evaluations of Paul's theologizing of the second
creation narrative, and its legacies after Augustine, Luther and
Calvinism, so pivotal in the development of theologies in the
West, has declined the continuation of the received view.
Krister Stendahl, writing as a Lutheran - in
which confession he functioned as a bishop - comments on the
Romans passage a propos of the doctrine of justification by
faith:
Perhaps it would be more instructive to note how Paul discusses the Adam/Christ or first Adam/last Adam (Christ) typology or parallelism once in Romans (5:14) and once in 1 Corinthians (15:45ff; cf. 15:22). In Romans 5 the doctrine about Adam and Christ is woven into an interesting argument about justification. In 1 Corinthians 15 there is not a hint in relation to the Adamic doctrine of justification. This indicates to me that the doctrine of justification is not the pervasive, organizing doctrinal principle or insight of Paul, but rather that it has a very specific function in his thought. I would guess that the doctrine of justification originates in Paul's theological mind from his grappling with the problem of how to defend the place of the Gentiles in the kingdom - the task with which he was charged in his call. (Krister Stendahl, Paul Among Jews And Gentiles, And Other Essays, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1976, p 27, emphasis original.)
2. AD FONTES AND THE OBVIOUS
UNSEEN(S)
What I wish to call into
question is the attention due to Paul, given to the second
creation narrative which has overshadowed the former narrative,
Genesis 1.1-2.4a. And this for two equally important reasons:
the effect which the focus on this disconsolate Hebraic fantasy
regarding the nature of death and 'man's' putative
responsibility for it has had, and continues to have for some,
on the doctrine of humankind - anthropology - and on the
doctrine of the person and work of Christ - Christology. My
objections rest upon two factors: (1) that Paul has no
convincing systematic method in this matter, and (2) that the P
creation narrative, which is nothing if not systematic, is also
the more significant of the two theologies, and that it is
endorsed by all four gospels. Their multiple attestation
overrides Paul's single voice, and is buttressed by their
virtual silence regarding the J narrative. Preparatory to these
claims, I return briefly to one of the staunchest of
contextualist readings of Paul, that of Hendrikus Boers. Boers
quotes from Whitehead at the beginning of his work What Is New
Testament Theology?: The Rise Of Criticism And The Problem Of
A Theology Of The New Testament the same criteria
for systematic theology to which I have already referred in the
discussion of the messianic miracles:
The vagueness of the term theology in contemporary usage is similar to the usage of the term philosophy, which ranges from a precise definition, such as that of Alfred North Whitehead, to the common claim of having a philosophy which amounts to no more than certain convictions about life. Whitehead defines speculative philosophy as “the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.” Similarly, theology is used sometimes in the more precise sense of a coherent system of thought concerning matters relating to God, but it also ranges to a vague sense of having certain convictions concerning the same matters .
On the basis of Whitehead’s definition of speculative philosophy, I propose the following as a working definition of theology: “A coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience concerning matters relating to God can be interpreted.” The adjective theological will be used in a more general sense to include every statement concerning God or every religious expression insofar as it may constitute the material out of which a theology in the above more precise sense could be developed by “coherent, logical, necessary” reasoning. (Boers p 13, emphasis original.)
Paul's Letters of course, at least invite reflection which might result in a theology. But they do not yet constitute theological literature in the sense of being either products of or presenting anything that even approximates a coherent system of thought on matters concerning the divine. Paul’s reasoning in each case is ad hoc, serving the immediate pastoral and apostolic concerns of a particular occasion and audience, and that is true for his Letter to the Romans too. In any case, it cannot be argued reasonably that Christian theology is the product of a continuation of a process of thought that was started by Paul, much as some of his theological arguments might lend themselves to further reflection and possibly even to the development of such a theology. (Ibid p 15.)
Commenting on 'the categories of thought' which
Bultmann presumed to find in Paul 'which, even though, not
timeless, were nevertheless, according to Bultmann, not
contingent in every respect, in the sense that they were valid
for human beings at all times', he adds:
And yet Paul was not quite such a theoretical thinker. As Wrede put it, Paul took the first, fundamentally very important step from religion to theology. Paul had not been a theologian in the stricter sense of the term. It was Bultmann who produced a system of thought on the basis of the hints provided by Paul. As is well known, according to Bultmann it was a system that was characterized by the conception that every statement about God was at the same time a statement about humanity. Paul’s theology, according to him, was at the same time anthropology, and his presentation of the theology of Paul bears this out. One may argue about the nature of the actual presentation provided by Bultmann, but in principle he has shown that it could be done. (Ibid p 79.)
One is reminded here of one
possible reason for the retreat from systematic theology in the
last century to which Robin Scroggs refers, namely its
difficulty, as well as of the dimensions of the task confronting
systematic theologians in the present climate of opinion which
he also remarks:
That Paul is a systematic theologian from whose documents statements of eternal theological validity can be mined is a view that disappeared long ago from scholarly horizons. I think it fair to say that the basic model from which our guild works today is that of Paul as a rhetorician. This shift in models carries with it a more or less subtle change in our understanding of the intentionality of the apostle. (Scroggs p 217.)
Now I think it is fair to say that we New Testament scholars are not a perverse lot. We pursue our leads with a certain optimism that these new approaches will bring new insights—as indeed they have. The approaches are not, however, conducive to the reconstruction of a theological statement of New Testament authors. In fact, it should be clear that they work against such reconstructions, that is, against any sort of systematic statement of a theological position. This antisystematic tendency, however, may be part of a larger pattern within our culture in which scholarship is participating, perhaps without knowing.
If one way of looking at the phenomenon I have described is to see it as a movement away from - and even as a rejection of - the construction of large-scale abstractions, of systems then this movement runs parallel to those within theological circles since the demise of neoorthodoxy. This may be particularly true of Protestant theology.
Barth, Brunner, and Tillich symbolize the systematic thrust of neoorthodoxy. Since the end of this once-powerful current, the "death of God" really symbolizes the death of systematics. Theologians attack specific issues, write small books, transmute theology into ethics. They do not seem to wish, or to think it possible, to create a theological system. The popularity of the view of theology as story in recent years is an obvious parallel to the stress on narrative in Gospel criticism. For many, story theology avoids the abstraction of systematic theology (the hard work as well!). When one can participate in story, especially if the story is partially one's own, theology comes alive and makes sense for the first time. (Ibid p 221, emphasis original.)
Is this the cultural stream in which we are moving today? A slow but irresistible current pushing us inevitably toward the via negativa? A rejection of what is being said because it does not seem to say anything, or can say anything? Maximalists are suspect because they say too much too confidently, while minimalists who speak only the "fragment" may be trusted because they evoke the unsayable, that which is true precisely because it cannot be expressed. Indeed, according to theologian Mark Taylor, this is what the deconstructionist philosophy of Jacques Derrida makes explicit: "In deconstructive criticism one attempts to open a gap in every work by teasing out the repressed that the text struggles not to express .... The deconstructive critic insists that something always escapes language. There is a remainder that is not only unsaid but unsayable." Hauntingly similar is a statement by a choreographer: "We only get our fingertips into that world for which there are no words." (Ibid p 222, 223.)
To keep ourselves in a larger perspective is helpful. In this case it may well be that the antisystematic prejudice of much New Testament scholarship is but part of the larger suspicion of intellectual structures and expressions in late twentieth-century culture. Perhaps, there is a hermeneutics of paranoia informing our society in a reaction against these systematic creations that once seemed so desirable in earlier decades. Knowing this may help us decide to "go with the flow," to accept our work as part of the larger and perhaps inevitable cultural dynamic. If we should decide to swim against the stream, it will help us to realize what a mighty current we must fight against. (Ibid p 223.)
3. DEMYTHOLOGIZING
DEMYTHOLOGIZING
Much of the responsibility for
the failure to discern the salient and systematic relation
between the narrative cycles, Genesis 1.1-2.4a and messianic
series, has stemmed from academic disregard for and hence the
lack of interdisciplinary approaches to biblical theology,
compounded by programmatic disdain for the genre of miracle
narratives, instituted by Rudolf Bultmann's 'demythologisation'.
The latter was wedded to a sub-philosophical, existentialist weltanschauung.
Ever atomized into increasingly unnrelated discrete units, the
logical, aesthetic and theological integrity of the series as a
whole, in its function of response to the creation story, evaded
recognition. Yet the organic consistency and theological value
of this series, maintained by all four gospels, and in lieu of
any almost any reference to the J narrative of creation, is
outstanding. It enjoins a complete hermeneutical reappraisal of
the P creation story; the other primary source of Christian
doctrine, which has equally succumbed to atrophy if not
oblivion.
Bultmann's sophistic claim of a 'signs gospel' as urtext
of the fourth gospel thus appears poignantly ironic in view of
this failure to discern the evident unity and systematic
character of the messianic series. (In this matter, I believe
that he was misguided, and led astray by the reference to
'second sign' in John 4.54.) That all but one of the six
messianic miracles are contained in Mark, as well as Matthew, as
is the story of the institution of the Eucharist, to which they
are preliminary, mandates their revisioning from the point of
view of 'history of the [written?] tradition', as both all the
more necessary and long overdue. 'Demythologisation' itself is a
myth. It is predicated on the assumption that the texts in
question, in order to be meaningful, must be historiographical;
they are not. Rather, they are theological; which means of
course, that they are metaphysical. It also depends
presumptively and blindly to the reality and significance of
context, on the analytical independence of each miracle
narrative of the others of its kind. The suppressed premises of
Bultmann's oeuvre, and devotees of its assumed method, is that
'myths' - which it never defines with epistemological clarity -
are necessarily untrue and so devoid of meaning; and that their
'demythologisation' must amount to a hermeneutic. It does not.
In that it has repercussions for the doctrine of creation, the
hermeneutical failure of demythologisation is complete. The
claim that it is a hermeneutic is nothing but scholastic
subterfuge. It remains theologically vacuous and tendentiously
iconoclastic.
I reject its methodological presuppositions and hermeneutical
pretensions root and branch. The messianic series is clearly the
most significant bearer of meaning for Markan doctrine, and
arguably, the primary metaphysical, propositional content of
Christian doctrine. Its semantic and pedagogic freight for
systematic, biblical theology is peerless. The treatment of the
genre of miracle narrative from my own point of view therefore,
has crucial consequences for the hermeneutic of the P creation
narrative. The meaning of these two stories of 'beginning and
end', is thus interdependent, and must incorporate in some
measure, that of The Apocalypse. The co-ordinated prosecution of
their hermeneutic(s) will be decisive for contemporary biblical
theology. Their syntactical integration is a pre-eminent
instance if not the foremost case of the hermeneutical principle
attributed to Luther, Scriptura sacra sui ipsius interpres:
"Sacred scripture is its own interpreter".
Recursion of the gospels to the first creation narrative
foundational to Christian theology, is a systematic enterprise,
and involves consideration of the significance of the Sabbath
'rest' of God qua a theology of death in its analogous relation
to the Eucharist. It comprises the doctrine of intentionality,
pursuant and vital to logos theology as well as the theme of
sanctification throughout The Apocalypse, depicted in terms of
the relation of human consciousness to the unity of identities
in God. These are central tenets of its sevenfold series of
seals, already announced in the Pneumatological, Eucharistic,
messianic miracle story, The Feeding Of The Four Thousand.
Returning to the question of a
theology which is not only biblical, but also systematic, I
begin here with Bultmann because of the violence done by his
commentary on the first of the messianic miracles, Transformation
Of Water Into Wine (John
2.1-11). This was among a string of attacks on what for the
movement of 'demythologizing' which followed, were nothing but
low hanging fruit, ripe for destruction; namely, the miracle
narratives. He rips the first Johannine sign story from its
narratological context,
that is, he fails to see any connection of the Eucharistic motif
which the story shares with two of its kind and ultimately with
the actual Eucharist. Given the reciprocity of the two
narratives, Genesis 1.1-2.4a and the messianic series, with
equal validity, that is, just as illogically one might have
detached one of the rubrics of the former, and treated it in
isolation from its certain frame of reference. John, to which
this particular miracle narrative is confined, contains also The Feeding Of
The Five Thousand, a copy of which all four gospels
include. The remaining Eucharistic miracle story, The Feeding Of
The Four Thousand is
common to both Mark and Matthew.
The lack of theological merit of
this school of thought rests upon two factors: (1) its
minimalist elevation of theological method to historiography
which it renders the virtually exclusive methodological
prerogative; and (2) its benighted, and perhaps even
willful failure to realize the contextual integration of the
six messianic miracles as a serial whole. Added to the evident
postulate that the seven messianic events constitute a gestalt,
a contextual whole, is that the three Eucharistic miracle
narratives, its primary subseries, preface the record of the
institution of the actual Eucharist itself. They are primary
for theological purposes, because they adduce the role of
sentient memory in consciousness as in salvation.
A final point must be entered
here concerning this school. It is this. Bultmann is of
course New Testament scholar, he does not embark on any
genuine consideration of the Tanakh. And that is as it may be.
However, his theological remit, largely in keeping with his
Lutheran background, is also decidedly Pauline, and this of
course must include Paul's interpretation of the J creation
narrative. This story offers unlimited potential for
'demythologization'. As far as I know however, nowhere does
Bultmann approach it according to this, his idiomatic modus
operandi. It remains permanently immune to any treatment
such as is applied to the miracle narratives of the gospels.
Let us now then first concentrate
on the simple-minded obtuseness of Bultmann's treatment of the
first messianic miracle narrative alone. I have no
compunction in uttering such invective, given the subsequent,
far-reaching effects of the programmatic, academic derision
which ensued. Similarly, I make no attempt to conceal my
enduring disdain for existentialisms/existentielisms and their
sundry offspring, since I view them as inherently antipathetic
to systematic theology. The dubiety of their sources in late
nineteenth century, continental writers such as Nietzsche and
Kierkegaard, are questionable to say the least; the former was
no more a philosopher than the latter was a theologian. The most
they can claim in terms of relevance for philosophical theology
must be, in the first instance as writers, and secondly, as
harbingers of critical theory with certain psychological
leanings.
4. THE MIRACLE AT CANA
I enter here my rejection of
widely upheld and current existentialist-demythologising
exercises in source criticism/Traditionsgeschichte which
postulate the source of this narrative. These allege as its
provenance, model or prototype, the Greek mythological
traditions concerning Dionysos. (In the case of the two
remaining Eucharistic miracle narratives some or another passage from the Tanakh is
proffered.) It is necessary to broach these avowals here, even
though the movement first engineered by Bultmann, 'Entmythologisierung'
is approaching its centenary. The History Of The
Synoptic Tradition first appeared in German in 1921, and
the English translation of The Gospel Of John: A Commentary,
fifty years later. His work set in train an ongoing method which
has spawned consequences for Christian theology that are nothing
short of disastrous: the wholesale neglect if not ridiculing of
the miracle narratives. In the hands of some of its contemporary
practitioners, who appear increasingly to be in danger of
devolving into populist hacks, it has reached an apogee
fortunately and shrilly sounding its own death knell. The
reduction of this particular miracle narrative to a single,
wholly unitary pericope, without any apparent syntactical accord
with others of its kind served this agenda admirably. The same
methodological ploy is utilised in the treatment of every one of
the six (seven) narratives which clearly form an organized
whole, very much more than the sum of its parts. Its glaringly
simplistic pseudo-exegesis and faux-hermeneutical
results determined trends in biblical theologies which survive
to this day in more wonted forms, in imminent danger of
devolving into demagoguery.
A case in point is John Shelby Spong's The Fourth
Gospel: Tales Of A Jewish Mystic, with its equally myopically
decontextualised treatment of the first messianic miracle story.
He sings from the same song-sheet as Bultmann, of whom he
explicitly approves, and not surprisingly, he stops even further
short of any in depth theological result, despondently casting
his bread upon the waters of an intellectually impoverished,
historical realism, which dictates that to be bereft of
historical possibility - let alone verisimilitude - is
tantamount to being bereft of meaning. Obliviously to any
connective tissue which the narrative may maintain with others
of its kind, the exegetical and hermeneutical task is deemed to
be done once this 'rationale' is pronounced; although it is not
even pronounced, since it evidently goes without saying. This is
the popular if not populist Spong's unremitting, and by now,
tiresome theme: the narratives are not historically
veridical. No, they are not; from start to finish they are
theological, that is, metaphysical. Bultmann reckons the
relegation of the miracle stories to the level of myth to be a
hermeneutic in itself. But we can see from the results it
yielded in his commentary on John just how worse than
implausible is this claim. Costive in extremis, they
will not pass muster as hermeneutical. Nor is his treatment of
the miracle story methodically exegetical.
This method of interpretation of the New Testament which tries to recover the deeper meaning behind the mythological conceptions I call de-mythologizing - an unsatisfactory word, to be sure. Its aim is not to eliminate the mythological statements but to interpret them. It is a method of hermeneutics. The meaning of this method will be best understood when we make clear the meaning of mythology in general. (Bultmann, Rudolph, Karl, Jesus Christ And Mythology, Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 1958, p 18.)
Over and over again I hear the objection that de-mythologizing transforms Christian faith into philosophy. This objection arises from the fact that I call de-mythologizing an interpretation, an existentialist interpretation, and that I make use of conceptions developed especially by Martin Heidegger in existentialist philosophy.
We can understand the problem best when we remember that de-mythologizing is an hermeneutic method, that is, a method of interpretation, of exegesis. "Hermeneutics" means the art of exegesis. (Ibid p 45, emphasis original).
The source counted this as the first miracle. It is easy to see why it put it at the beginning of its collection; for it is an epiphany miracle. There are no analogies with it in the old tradition of Jesus-stories, and in comparison with them it appears strange and alien to us. There can be no doubt that the story has been taken over from heathen legend and ascribed to Jesus. In fact the motif of the story, the changing of the water into wine, is a typical motif of the Dionysus legend. In the legend, this miracle was the epiphany of the God, and was therefore dated on the day of the Dionysus Feast, that is on the night of the 5th to 6th of January. This relationship was still understood in the Early Church, which saw the Feast of Christ's Baptism as his epiphany and celebrated it on the 6th January. Equally it held that the 6th of January was the date of the marriage at Cana.
For the Evangelist, the meaning of the story is not contained simply in the miraculous event; this, or rather the narrative, is the symbol of something which occurs throughout the whole of Jesus' ministry, that is, the revelation of the doca/ of Jesus. As understood by the Evangelist, this is not the power of the miracle worker, but the divinity of Jesus as the Revealer, and it becomes visible for faith in the reception of xa/riv and a)lh/qeia; his revelation of his doca/ is nothing more nor less than the revelation of the o/)noma of the Father (17.6). Of this the epiphany story can provide only a picture; and equally, the e)pi/steusan ei)v au)to\n (oi) maqhtai\ au)tou~), in the Evangelist's view, can be no more than a symbolic representation of the faith which the Revealer arouses by his Word. (Bultmann, Rudolph, The Gospel Of John: A Commentary, Translated by G. R. Beasley-Murray, General Editor, R. W. N. Hoare, and J. K. Riches, The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1971, p 118-119).
The mention of 'symbol of something' and
'symbolic representation' point to what is lacking in
Bultmann's commentary; in short, a hermeneutic. (The treatment
afforded the two miracles of loaves and fish in The
History Of The Synoptic Tradition is equally
perfunctory, and even more devoid of any real engagement with
the text such as might be deemed 'exegetical'. Each is
dispensed with in a single paragraph, and in total, they
occupy less than a single page.) A more recent example of
'demythologization' - a term almost as sequipedalian, orotund
and unpronounceable as the original German, 'Entmythologisierung'
- by one of his protegées, Uta Ranke-Heinemann, follows
faithfully in the footsteps of her mentor, but it fares no
better. Page after page of her caustic iconoclasm becomes
trite and tiring, and is even more facile:
Plainly put, in the legend of the marriage at Cana Jesus reveals his divine power in the same way that stories had told of the Greek god Dionysus. The 6th of January became for Christians the feast of the power revelation (epiphany) of their God, thereby displacing the feast of Dionysus's epiphany. As Bultmann says, "No doubt the story [of the marriage feast at Cana] has been borrowed from pagan legends and transferred to Jesus" (Bultmann, Das Evangelium, p. 83). On his feast day, Dionysus made empty jars fill up with wine in his temple in Elis; and on the island of Andros, wine flowed instead of water from a spring or in his temple. Accordingly, the true miracle of the marriage feast at Cana would not be the transformation by Jesus of water into wine, but the transformation of Jesus into a sort of Christian wine god. (Ranke-Heinemann, Uta, Putting Away Childish Things: The Virgin Birth, The Empty Tomb, And Other Fairy Tales You Don't Need To Believe In To Have A Living Faith, translated by Peter Heinegg, Harper, San Francisco, 1992, pp 81-82)
Bultmann is presumably as unable and
unconcerned to specify just why 'six stone jars' were
involved in the 'power
revelation', a term better fitted to the complementary
miracle of 'virtual transcendence', Transfiguration;
whether or not the mother of Dionysus was present in
the Greek accounts, and what her intervention means in the
Johannine narrative; and indeed finally what, if anything, the
story as a whole, means, just as is Ranke-Heinemann to tell us
exactly what we do need to believe in order to have a
living faith. His working premise is that one is at liberty to
dispense with hermeneutics once the event in question has been
consigned to 'myth', or that the relegation of the narrative
in such terms constitutes its hermeneutic.
Having accepted the baton from their
forerunner, David Friedrich Strauss, Bultmann and
Ranke-Heinemann both subscribe to the presupposition that
whatever is unhistorical or unnatural - read
miracle - is an idea, and thus myth - read untrue, hence
meaningless. The term 'myth', crucial to this gambit, receives
neither substantively literary nor epistemological treatment.
My disaffection for such 'theologizing' stems from its
abdication of the hermeneutical task incumbent of any
theologian. Ranke-Heinemann disposes of the other two
Eucharistic miracle stories with equal and efficient despatch,
approving the old chestnut that one of the two
stories involving loaves and fishes is a duplicate.
Neither does the remiss failure of chauvinistic evangelists to
explicitly mention women and children, in some measure at
least, escape her notice and polemical censure:
Some miracles reported of Jesus are modeled on Old Testament prototypes. Take, for example, the feeding of the five thousand (or four thousand): "A man came from Baal-shal-ishah, bringing the man of God bread of the first fruits, twenty loaves of barley, and fresh ears of grain in his sack. And Elisha said, 'Give to the men, that they may eat.' But his servant said, 'How am I to set this before a hundred men?' So he repeated, 'Give them to the men, that they may eat, for thus says the Lord, "They shall eat and have some left"' So he set it before them. And they ate, and had some left, according to the word of the Lord" (2 Kings 4:42-44). (Ibid p 87).
The so-called nature miracles are likewise fairy tales, one and all. With regard to the miraculous multiplication of the loaves, we have seen that it has Old Testament models. There are several versions of this dining miracle. In Matthew (14:13-21) "five thousand men, not counting women and children" are fed with five loaves and two fish. This is a faintly chauvinistic mode of reckoning; Mark (6:44) has simply "five thousand men"; the women and children aren't even mentioned. Luke (9:14) puts the crowd at "around five thousand men," and John (6:10) is no more polite,"about five thousand men." All the Evangelists inform us that there were twelve baskets of bread left over. (Ibid p 93).
Alongside this version with the five loaves and the two fish there is yet another, added on by Mark and Matthew. This time it's seven loaves and "some" fish. In Mark 8:9 the total number of the people fed is cited as four thousand, and there are seven baskets of "broken pieces." It's the same in Matthew, except that once again women and children are not included in the total (15:38).
Many Catholic Bibles provide clear headings to distinguish the"First Multiplication of the Loaves" from the "Second Multiplication of the Loaves." But it's no good. One can write all the headings one wants; we are still left with different accounts of one and the same multiplication of loaves. There's no second miracle; and word of this is slowly getting around even among Catholic theologians.
The first signs of this shift are already visible in the Catholic Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche. "The exegetes, and in part Catholic exegetes as well, nowadays generally assume that both narratives are dealing with a single event" ([1958] II, 709). They are variants or doublets, whatever one wishes. But some people are still racking their brains over why in one variant the number given is five thousand and in the other it's four thousand. And these riddle-solvers even find reasons for the discrepancy, as if the whole episode were historical. But from the historical standpoint, there was neither one nor two "miraculous multiplications of loaves." There was none at all. (Ibid p 94).
I accept without reservation the allusion
of the two miracles of loaves and fish to the stories about
Elisha, just as I do the association between The
Transfiguration and the traditions concerning Moses on
Mount Sinai. These are allusions or associations only. Any
merit they may claim as precedents can only be marginal given
the clear logical and aesthetic rapport sustained by the
sevenfold messianic series and the P narrative. Moreover to
leave both matters, supposed provenance, and necessary meaning
as accounted for in terms of myths about Dionysos and their
self-evidently fictive status and therefore meaninglessness is
facile to a degree qualifiable by the very epithet she uses to
decry the narratives: 'childish'. My chief objection is that
'exegetical' determination of the miracle narratives as
mythological in kind, should evidently absolve the
hermeneut of any obligation.
Regarding the source of the first messianic
miracle, there is nothing at all in the Tanakh operative as
'antetext'. But indeed, there is rather a serial narrative,
which logically functions as the analogue of the
messianic series in its entirety, to which it belongs as 'end'
does to 'beginning'. The clarity of this intertextual relation
is perhaps blinding; sometimes what is all too plain is all
too easily overlooked. I reject arrantly the notion that the
first sign of the series is beholden to originals whether in
Euripides, Pausanias, Aeschylus, Xenocles, Iophon or Chaeremon. My reasons for doing so emphasise
the formal significance of the text plainly provided by its
numerical ciphers. These confirm its being of a piece with the
remaining two Eucharistic miracle stories, and of course with
the actual Eucharist.
Not to discern this is remiss in the extreme,
as is ignorance of the obvious rapport maintained by these
three miracle narratives and the Eucharist. Wine 'the fruit of
the vine' (Luke 22.18, cf. the same circumlocution in Matthew
28.29), was certainly drunk at the last supper. The later
reference in John 19.34 to 'blood and water' denoting the
death of Jesus likewise points to the Eucharist. Precisely
this, and of course the P narrative where we find its specific
'antetext' or 'precedent', and not any Hellenic text, is then
the first point of reference of the miracle narrative. The
resonance between it and the Eucharist itself should have
signalled its value to the Lutheran Bultmann, since
proclamation of the 'kerygma' (the Word), of such
moment to him, habitually takes place within the context of
that sacrament. Moreover, the characteristic rehabilitation of
marriage and consequent sexual union as arguably the major
psychological turning point on which the German Reformation
hinges, further adds to the poignancy of his failure. Party to
this was the historical divide between the Lutheran denial of
free-will and the Erasmian advocacy of the same, a chief
impediment of any reconciliation. In this much, Lutheran
philosophical psychology once again confirms desire, with its
defining criterion, constraint, as a primary function,
operation, or aspect of the soul; that is, of mind itself.
As for the actual miracle narrative, the strong
sense which it bears of its own innovative stature works
towards the same distinctive cast, that of theological, and
certainly Christological innovation, the subject of several
dominical logia early in Mark, which at once echo its
contents and the sense of a completely new dispensation, the
theology of actual immanence:
No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; if he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but new wine is for fresh skins. (Mark 2.21-22, emphasis added.)
What the messianic series brings to biblical
metapsychology is indeed novel. It is the clarion doctrinal
complement of the content of the P narrative, which
otherwise remains incomplete and unintelligible; the
delineation of perceptual consciousness. There is no
equivalent theological proclamation within either the Tanakh
nor elsewhere in the literature of antiquity to this effect.
(This said, I have already indicated that I agree entirely
with the findings of Katherine Veach Dyer concerning the
Lukan travel narrative and its recasting of Jesus as a
Dionysian figure in "Healing
Steps": Jesus' Dionysiac Tour In Luke, in
particular with part III: Luke 8.38-1.10, The
Jericho Exchange, The Bacchae, And The End Of The
Itinerary.)
Any supposed copying by one of the feeding
miracles of the other, especially the alleged duplication
of one of the stories of loaves and fish by the other, is
grist to the theological mill of this school. We are meant
to make this observation initially. It is a starting
point. Diderot's maxim is apt here: 'Le premier pas vers
la philosophie, c'est l'incrédulité' - 'The first step
toward philosophy is incredulity.' Leaving matters there
however, is exegetically errant to say the least. That The
Feeding Of The Five Thousand and The Feeding Of
The Four Thousand are mimetically related, is
congruent with the relation of the phonetic to the graphic
'Word'. Without further ado, the pandits of
'demythologisation' in making this all too obvious,
because initial observation, use it to further justify
abandonment of the texts and abdication of any
further exegetical or hermeneutical procedure. There is no attempt on the part of such efforts
to come to terms with the corpus of the healing and
messianic narratives as gestalten which are
internally coherent and aesthetically integrated, nor to
deal sensitively with any possibility of their semantic
worth. The two miracles at sea, The Stilling Of The
Storm and The Walking On The Water, bear to
one another, the same relationship as that of The
Feeding Of The Four Thousand and The Feeding Of
The Five Thousand. This leaves all the more in their
starkest outlines, the Christologies of the series, Transformation
Of Water Into Wine and Transfiguration.
What could have alerted,
and indeed should have alerted the academy to the value
of the messianic series, and further, to its
significance for Eucharistic theology, was its own
repetitious insistence that one of the stories of
miraculous feeding with loaves and fish was a duplicate
of the other. Even where the same morphology occurred
vis-à-vis the two messianic miracles at sea, Stilling
The Storm and Walking
On The Water, no advances were undertaken. When we
examine the first creation story we discover the same
configuration. There are two rubrics, Day 2 and Day 3,
which utilize similar leitmotifs - and which no less
obviously, bear some patent pertinence to the two sea
miracles just mentioned; this is recapitulated in the
second half of the story. There, Days 5 and 6 both
involve living creatures. Remarking the similarity of
two of the Eucharistic miracles and the same pattern
obtaining between two of the miracles of virtual
transcendence, the two events of crossing the sea, why
was not the same pattern occurring in both halves of the
P creation series noted? Indeed why was not the
self-evident sevenfold seriality of both narrative
catena a sufficient prompt to further investigation?
Possibly because of the isolation to one gospel only,
that of John, of the first event of the chain. But the
pointers to the significance of this episode and their
apparent recursion to the story of beginning, the P
narrative, should have been sufficient.
This means of course that both series contain
just two members which exist apart from the two sets of
similar descriptions: the first and last events of the
messianic series, and the first and fourth of the Days
of creation. I highlight the term 'series' because it
brings to our notice the fact that not only are the two
narratives serial in form - this might not seem as
certain in the messianic series, for a very good reason.
The sequence of the messianic episodes is the same in
all four gospels. That too is a fact which deserves more
notice than it has ever been afforded. Thus once we give
due attention to 'the first of his signs',
and once we observe John's use of the same expression
'sign' (shmei~on, John 6.14,
26, 30) of the paired miracles at
the epicentre of their series, The
Feeding Of The Five Thousand and The
Walking On The Water, the theological import of
this chain of narratives is even more conspicuous.
Again I highlight the term 'paired'; and again because
it adverts to yet another simple morphological feature
of both serial narratives. The series of Days of
creation are formed in parallel; 1-4, 2-5, 3-6, with the
Sabbath remaining as noted, the ostensible anomaly, both
in respect of not depicting a creative fiat,
and in respect of being unpaired. (So too the Eucharist
has no formal, corresponding partner, and so too is not a miracle,
notwithstanding that it clearly belongs to the messianic
series.) The six miracles on the other hand form a
chiasmos; thus first and last, second and second last,
and the two central episodes, the third and third last,
establish the same morphology as do the Days; they are
paired.
Now these are extraordinary facts to have escaped our
notice for so long such that one can only wonder at the
sheer ineptitude of academic theology to have taken as
gospel, I mean, to have fallen for, the legacy of David
Strauss via Bultmann et
al, which has been nothing other than consistently
unprofessional, negligent and reprehensible. The simple
fact that the two series are noticeably isomorphic
should have awakened the interest of biblical theologians.
There is nothing comparable in terms of this consonance
between the Tanakh and the New Testament. I make these
claims because the dual morphology of the creation
narrative has been a commonplace of scholarship for some
time, and because in itself, it cries out for further
scrutiny. That is, this most abstract of any scriptural
text invites fulsome consideration of its form as no
less significant than its content, and as being on a par
with which the proliferation of numbers in the three
Eucharistic miracle narratives function.
The contextual ambit of the first messianic
miracle is extensive. It is really only with the second
sign, described as such (John 4.43) that a noticeably
deliberate change occurs in his agenda. Jesus And
The Woman Of Samaria (4.1-42), which ends the reach of
the first sign, even if it has been interpolated as is so
often argued, fits perfectly into a whole of which the
miracle story itself is the keynote. These two narratives
bracket the intervening texts. The twofold reiteration of
the cipher six, first explicitly, next implicitly, secures
the passage's position and function as the final term of an
inclusio of which the miracle story is the first:
Jacob's well was there, and so Jesus, wearied as he was with his journey, sat down beside the well. It was about the sixth hour ( w(/ra h)~n w(v e(/kth John 4.6)
Jesus said to her, "Go, call your husband, and come here." The woman answered him,"I have no husband." Jesus said to her, "You are right in saying (kalw~v ei)/pav), 'I have no husband'; for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband; this you said truly." (4.16-18)
John's use of this numerical
symbol is consonant with its purpose in the Markan and
Matthean accounts of The Transfiguration, where it
denotes the concluding miracle of the messianic series.
John's gospel no less, will utilise the same construct after
the story of Lazarus, his theological equivalent to The
Transfiguration, to denote its complementary
relationship to the first event. That is, The
Anointing At Bethany involving the three personae
involved in the miracle, Mary, Martha and Lazarus, begins: 'Six
days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where
Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.' (John
12.1, emphasis added). This as certainly invokes the
hexameron of creation as does the opening temporal clause of
the gospel: 'In the beginning ...' In fact, that the
Passover is included in the temporal phrase, making it the
seventh day, suggests nothing if not the resultant
morphology of Sabbath-Eucharist, however nuanced that might
seem.
Themes woven into Jesus And the Woman Of
Samaria conduce to its consistency with the theological
understanding of the incarnate Word plainly given in the story
of the first messianic sign. For example the motif of water;
the name of the city, Sychar which suggests the Hebrew for
'male'; the motif of Jacob's well; the metaphor of thirst as a
trope for sexual desire, specifically the desire of woman for
man; and the putative sense of the actual exchange between the
woman and Jesus itself, which so scandalised the disciples.
These elements all fit with the miracle narrative. Various
other factors equally ratify the function of John 4.1-42 as
the final element of an inclusio formally begun in the
previous narrative. In just this capacity it works
conclusively to this first section of the gospel. The
concluding episode has the man Jesus importuning the
woman for water to drink (John 4.7); in the prior
occasion, the woman Mary importunes Jesus for wine
on behalf of the guests. (We should add this feature of
the narrative to its typologically feminine cast and as
further evidence militating against any tendency in the fourth
gospel to elevate Mary by making her a virgin/'maiden' such as
we may read in Luke and Matthew. John's incarnational theology
offers no support at all to such a view, but rather, inclines
against it.) The reference to the woman leaving her 'water
jar' (u(dri/an John 4.28) is
similarly intended to link this pericope with the miracle
story (u(dri/ai 2.6, u(dri/av 2.7), thereby further
rendering it the final term of the inclusio.
Returning to the messianic miracle story, we see comparable
close connectedness between it and the pericope which ensues
immediately, The Cleansing Of The Temple (2.13-22).
This renders the temple a trope for the body:
The Jews then said, "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days ( e)n trisi\n h(me/raiv)?" But he spoke of the temple of his body (e)/legen peri\ tou~ naou~ tou~ sw/matov au)tou~ 2.21).
The three day motif here recurs to the sign
story which it introduced, so ensuring this narrative as of a
piece with the first section of the gospel:
On the third day (Kai\ th~? h(me/ra? th~? tri/th?) there was a marriage at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there; (2.1).
The text of Jesus And Nicodemus,
except for a brief pericope, Jesus Knows All Men
(vv 23-25), follows directly. The latter includes a reference
to 'the signs that he did' (v 23), and in the former Nicodemus
mentions '"these signs that you do"' (3.2.). I have elsewhere
dealt with the extrapolation from the diurnal/nocturnal cycle
to the messianic events, concluding that the miracle at Cana
signifies the nocturnal interval focused upon midnight, and in
the annual cycle, midwinter night. Attentiveness to temporal
references in these texts usually yields germane results, and
this is no exception:
Now there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night (nukto\v John 3.2a).
John pictures Nicodemus with the robustly
graphic and candidly ironic tone that we have come to expect
of him, and in a light at once comparable to his image of the
guileless Nathanael:
Nicodemus said to him, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb (ei)v th\n koili/an)?" (3.4)
Jesus then addresses Nicodemus in terms
reminiscent of Nathanael's recognition of Jesus himself as
both a teacher, 'Rabbi' and 'the King of Israel' (1.49):
Jesus answered him,"Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand this?" (3.10).
There is a further consonance between this
pericope and that of Jesus And Nathanael. The
entire passage turns on a series of dichotomous constructs.
The first of these pits flesh and Spirit against one another
(vv 5-8); then a further contrast ensues (vv 11-13), between
'earthly things' (ta\ e)pi/geia)
and 'heavenly things' (ta\ e)poura/nia).
Finally Jesus' speech so recalls the theology of the prologue
and the language of ascent-descent with which the calling
narrative ended, leading directly to the miracle story:
"No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man." (3.13).
The story of Jesus and Nicodemus also
concludes on the theme of belief and includes a final
juxtaposition of light and darkness qua good and evil
(vv 19-21).
Like the story, Jesus And The Samaritan Woman, that of
Jesus And John The Baptist (3.22-30) has at its core
the water motif, even if its metaphorical value here is at
fullest variance with its function in both the miracle story
and the story of the woman, although the word 'purifying' (kaqarismou~ John 3.25) clearly resumes
the miracle narrative (kaqarismo\n
2.6). This pericope adroitly mirrors that narrative in
its handling of the relationship between baptism and
Eucharist, logos and incarnate Son, Thanatos
and Eros, heaven and earth:
John answered, "No one can receive anything except what is given him from heaven ( e)k tou~ ou)ranou~).) You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him. He who has the bride is the bridegroom; the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly (xara~? xai/rei) at the bridegroom's voice; therefore this joy of mine ( h( xara\ h( e)mh\) is now full. He must increase, but I must decrease." (3.27-30).
Only the text of He Who Comes From Heaven
(3.31-36) remains for consideration. It intervenes before the
conclusion to this first section of the gospel, which the
story of Jesus And The Samaritan Woman accomplishes,
its juxtaposed categories of heaven-earth conforming to the
basic construal of the elements utilised in the miracle, water
and wine, and thus also to the Eucharistic theology presented
there. But here, for added contrast, the emphasis is on the
transcendental rather than on the immanent term, just as it is
in the portraits of Jesus and the Samaritan woman. Thus
the scope of the Christology of immanence delivered in the
first messianic miracle story of the gospel extends to John
4.42, and the mention of 'the second sign that Jesus did when
he had come from Judea to Galilee' (4.54) at the conclusion of
the second miracle story, noticeably not a part of the
messianic series itself, but a healing event, and a miracle
nonetheless, marks a new beginning in the narrative.
John 2.1-11 begins as does its proper
messianic counterpart, The Transfiguration, with a
temporal reference:
On the third day (Kai\ th~? h(me/ra? th~? tri/th?) there was a marriage at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. (John 2.1).
If, as is the case for The
Transfiguration, this is intended as an immediate
reference to the creation narrative, for which there is a very
strong case, given that the logosode begins this
gospel, and given the subsequent three references to 'the next
day' (vv 29, 35, 43), then we should understand it in
conjunction with the Pneumatological rubrics of the P story,
those of Day 3 and Day 6. The actual counterpart of the
miracle narrative, John's first sign itself, is the Day 4
rubric, but that does not proscribe this procedure. Taken as a
whole these several temporal references to 'days' amount to
six in all. Indeed, the metaphorical/analogical function of
the 'six stone jars ... for the Jewish rites of purification,
each holding two or three measures' (v 6), the present
hermeneutic reckons as referential to the six messianic events
themselves. These delineate the doctrine of perceptual
consciousness in juxtaposition to the categoreal deposition of
the sixfold conceptual polarity first announced in the
creation story. The figure of the transmutation of six
containers of water into six containers of wine announces the
two taxonomies of 'beginning and end'; the six conceptual
forms, and their corresponding six perceptual analogues.
Therefore we may best read the incipient temporal phrase 'On
the third day ...', as recursive to the complementary stories
of Day 3 and Day 6, the pure conceptual form, symbolic
masculine and conceptual form of unity, symbolic feminine,
respectively. The mention of 'the mother of Jesus' affirms the
latter in particular. It is interesting to note there is no
suggestion of any virginal birth of Jesus himself here. If
anything, the association of his mother with the episode, and
her intervention on behalf of the guests alludes to her own
humanity, pursuant to the depiction of the human couple(s?) in
the Day 6 story, which is inseparable from the blessing of the
creator and the injunction to procreate. That the Day 3 rubric
for its part, is complementary to this final, and certainly
eschatological image of humanity itself, under the aegis of
the symbolic feminine (male and female), surely sits
with the portrait of the Son of man, a vision of whom Jesus
promised Nathanael (and others?) at the end of the
introduction to the sign story.
The Son of man I am contending, is identical to the symbolic
masculine, and stands as the counterpoint to the symbolic
feminine. This is ultimately relevant to biblical eschatology,
in relation to which I will resume the further consideration
of the anthropic categories, symbolic masculine and symbolic
feminine. There must be some measure of contrast between the
two, as is so for each of the three entities categorised by
the narrative: mind and mind : body (Day 1 : Day 4), space and
space : time (Day 2 : Day 5), and symbolic masculine and
symbolic feminine (Day 3 : Day 6). Of course the last, in its
transcendent form, symbolic masculine, is problematic as far
as it concerns the theology of transcendence, because the
anthropic category itself is weighted in virtue of immanence.
For which very reason, the Day 3 rubric demonstrably mitigates
the theme of separation between both pairs of entities, sea
and earth, and the two 'kinds' of plants.
This anticipates the value and status of the
final entity, symbolic feminine, over its precursor, symbolic
masculine, and underlines the problematic. Taken as a whole,
the two rubrics further anticipate the disclosure of the
Pneumatology of the messianic series, The Stilling Of The
Storm and The Feeding Of The Four Thousand.
These proclaim the perceptual categories optic imagination and
optic memory as the actually immanent components of
consciousness. That is, they are the absolute and final
realization of the Pneumatological strand introduced in the
creation story. This confirms the role of vision in the
exchange between Jesus and Nathanael immediately prior to the
miracle story, which remarkably, recurs to the second
creation narrative involving the man and the woman in the
garden which also highlights the role of vision; both in terms
of the desirable aspect of the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, and in the subsequent realization
by the human couple of their nakedness. In all of this, the
emphatic axiological note concerns beauty and its relation to
Pneumatology.
The narrative contains yet another allusive triad, one
which we should not overlook: the a)rxitri/klinov
- 'architriklinos. The figure, 'the steward of the feast' is
mentioned just three times (2.8, 9). We should allow the full
effect of these references to resonate, they are as
far-reaching as they are subtle. The term derives from the
structure of the seating arrangements at the symposium, or
drinking/feasting party, Greek in its origin. There were three
such rows, at right angles to one another, in alignment with
three of the four walls of the room. On these guests
would have disported themselves, sitting, and/or reclining.
The prefix a)rxi denotes the
chief, or head of these guests, but naturally enough also
alludes to the story of 'beginning', a)rxh~?
(John 1.1, Genesis 1.1 LXX) in its noticeably tripartite
format. The refinement and fulsomeness of this single term is
outstanding. The three entities of beginning/creation ('arche')
to which the narrative thus alludes, are those three of the
second half, Days 4, 5, 6. But since the miracle story lists
the full tally of messianic events qua perceptual forms, and
since the reference to the format of the room isolates its
fourth, final, side, the allusion extends to the seventh Day
just as clearly as the sign story does to the Eucharist. These
triplicities then list the three virtually immanent conceptual
forms, or conceptual forms of unity, analogous to the
three forms of actual immanence whose systematic depiction the
first messianic miracle story here begins: the conceptual
forms of unity, mind : body (Day 4), space : time (Day 5), and
symbolic masculine : symbolic feminine (Day 6).
The term 'beginning' is clearly resonant for John:
This, the first of his signs (a)rxh\n tw~n shmei/wn), Jesus
did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory; and his
disciples believed in him. (John 2.11 emphasis added);
and he intends by such a conclusion, to advert to the
organization of the hexameron, in which the Christological
rubrics, Day 1 and Day 4, are the first members of their taxa.
Does this persona, the architriklinos, then function
as a metaphor for the fourth rubric of the theology of virtual
immanence, portrayed in the Sabbath, succinctly put in the
connotative value of the image of three groups of persons
'reclining' of which he is the head, or in some sense,
'source'? We might just as validly say 'resting'. Certainly
the term sits very naturally with the connotative value of
Sabbth rest qua death, echoing the remark of Jesus
concerning his 'hour'. And just as subtlely the pattern 3 : 4
mirrors the physical shape of the banqueting room, only one
side of which remains differentiated from the other three, and
the language is synonymously nuanced with extraordinay
economy; three references to the architriklinos figure
himself, and one to 'arche'. The convivial tones of the
narrative, which will be repeated later in the Eucharistic
miracle narratives, and to some extent in those of the
Eucharist itself, is a decisive secondary quality of all three
feeding miracles as a whole, and none more so than this, since
I am proposing that the topic of the narrative, haptic memory,
is the source of the intentional mode conscious desire; that
is, Eros not Thanatos. Jesus' retort to his
mother underlines the same allusion:
And Jesus said to her, "O woman, what have
you to do with me? My hour has not yet come."
This remark has a dual effect. It initally reinforces the
evocation of the three forms of unity, male : female (symbolic
feminine), time (space : time) and soma (mind : body), in that
order, which is just that of their taxonomic hierarchy.
The final reference, to the body, is inferred directly by his
reference to the approaching death on the the cross, and of
course to the Eucharist itself, which precedes it. But it also
effects a clear reiteration of the distinction between
the three forms of memory as radicals of actual immanence,
actual perceptual consciousness, and the three radicals of
virtual perceptual consciousness, virtual immanence, the three
conceptual forms of unity, and thus simultaneously that of the
conscious from the aconscious respectively. The status of the
former as normative for immanence remains unique.
Comparable to this is the net result of the miracle itself,
demonstrated in the alterity of the two substances, water and
wine. No one can become intoxicated by water, and the
nature of sexual appetition-satisfaction, is illustrated by
this metaphor. The same metaphor posits the radical difference
between conceptual and perceptual poles of consciousness, akin
to the difference of the logos asarkos from logos
enarkos, because in the first instance, conceptual forms
of unity, are just that, conceptual. Their first level
classification accentuates their ancillary functioning
vis-à-vis the pure conceptual forms. This reading is secured
contextually, by the close proximity of the miracle story to
the hymn celebrating the Word become flesh. Thus the
conceptual aconscious, those three forms of unity
isomorphically co-extant with conscious, perceptual radicals,
forms of memory, are those particular occasions the text
associated with awareness of death. But effectively, the
entire P creation story insofar as it is geared towards the
Sabbath, concerns a theology of death. Death is at least as
central to this narrative as it is to the J story. Given the
impetus of the narrative, its directedness towards the final,
the 'last' Day, we can reasonably urge that the theme of death
is indeed, however subtlely because it remains inexplicit,
absolutely pivotal to its meaning overall.
The significance and value of this narrative for Christian
theology is difficult to overestimate. By theology, I do not
mean merely Christology, since this alone of the three
Eucharistic miracle stories tells for the identity of 'The
Son'. Quite apart from its certain articulation of the
phenomenon of erotic love, is its presentation of
'psychogenesis'. I mean by this term, its reckoning the
generation and disposition of the 'soul'. The dominical logion
to Nathanael which concludes the introduction to the miracle
story, concerning the ascent and descent of angels upon the
Son of man conveys this, characterising Jesus as the divine
bridegroom - Eros, but not without reference to death,
as we glean from Jesus' response to his mother's intervention;
that is, the reference to his '"hour [which] has not yet
come"'.
Reading the first messianic miracle story in
the light of conception does not entail that the text advocate
a purely functional role for human sexuality. It does not
confer upon the sexual communio of husband and wife,
exclusive confinement to the purpose of procreation. The
presence of others than the bride and bridegroom, namely, the
guests, the disciples, and of course the servants (dia/konoi John 2.5, 9) above all, puts
paid to any such ideological eisegesis. The former
introduction in which Jesus cryptically remarks that he had
seen Nathanael 'under the fig tree' is party to the same
understanding; the understanding of our human inclination to
engage in the unique and transformative kind of pleasure
offered by mutual sexual gratification. We might well view
this as 'miraculous'. Certainly it qualifies as 'good' (ka\lon (oi}non)
v 10 bis) and just as certainly, as a 'sign' (shmei/wn, v11). The word 'pleasure' in
this context seems strange to classical Christian theology;
but it is more fitting than anything else. Sexual pleasure,
the goodness of mutually satisfying sexual love, cannot be
judged in any other way according to the narrative,
irrespective of how strangely or uncomfortably this may fall
upon some Christian ears.
That John considers it a 'sign' must be taken in conjunction
with the enumeration of the stone jars. In other words, there
are six 'signs' constituting the messianic series, for the
perceptual pole of consciousness is quantifiable in this way,
identically to the enumeration of the conceptual pole. Thus
the figure is foremost a reference to the messianic series
itself; the six miracles accomplished by Jesus. These announce
the rudimentary constituents of human, perceptual mind, and
stand in one-to-one correspondence with their six 'antecedent'
conceptual counterparts, whose taxonomical deposition is the
business of the creation narrative. Hence the binary
water-wine construct immediately cites the Genesis story, the
story of 'arche' or beginning, of antecedence. If that,
if there is no conceptual polarity of mind without an equal
and opposite perceptual pole, then the act of human
generation, human reproduction as the outcome of coition is
married to the miraculous status of the event itself. For it
is miraculous not only in its immediate effect, orgasm. It is
miraculous also in that the birth of the child which may or
may not ensue, is effectively the procreation of an ensouled
being. And this being, like all members of the human race,
bears the image and likeness of God. Hence the constitution of
its mind : body (soma) manifests the imago Dei
as revealed in the narrative cycles of 'beginning and end'.
The idea of the provenance of the soul stands behind the story
just as does that of incarnation itself. The narrative could
hardly bear more significance than it does in this accounting
for the way in which Christ-Eros and procreation,
Christology and metapsychology, are bound together.
Now six stone jars wer standing there, for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding two or three measures. (xwrou~sai a)na\ metrhta\v du/o h)\ trei~v, John 2.6, emphasis added.)
(In The Apocalypse we will encounter the final iteration of sevenfold form, not in the four series of letters, seals, trumpets and bowls alone, but in those of the two unnumbered visions also. There is a total of six septenary literary sequences in that work, and certainly as a whole it must be taken in league with the congruous morphology of the two narrative cycles, those of 'beginning and end', so economically envisaged in the metaphor of the six stone jars containing water which is transformed into the same quantity of wine. But there are not eighteen entities postulated in the taxonomies of Genesis and gospel, the product of six and three. Rather, the product of six and two. That is, only twelve entities enjoy the status of categoreal radicals, that is, as ultimate determinants of consciousness. And these fit the formulae :'beginning and end', 'first and last', 'the Alpha and the Omega'. Any ambiguity of these formulae, like that of the reference to the capacity of the jars themselves, 'two or three' can be read against the the syntax co-ordinating the three texts: the story of the seven 'archaeological' Days; the story of the seven 'teleological' messianic events; the story of the sevenfold, eschatological processes in The Apocalypse.)
Thus even though the immanent
Christology of the series, that is, John's first 'sign', was
absent from all three of the synoptic accounts, another factor
which lent to its being a ready target for criticism, that same
series was all but complete in what is reckoned as the earliest
of the three gospels, and moreover, in the gospel of Matthew.
Matthew also recounts Mark's recapitulation of the two miracles
of loaves and fish (Mark 8.14-21; Matthew 16.5-12). The sequence of the messianic miracles is in every
case the same, even in the gospel of Luke, which lacks not just
the first episode, but a further two.
(The Transformation Of Water
Into Wine (John 2.1-11)),
The Stilling
of the Storm (Mark 4.35-.31; Matthew 8.18, 23-27),
The
Feeding of the Five Thousand (6.30-.44; Matthew 14.13-21),
The
Walking on the Water (6.45-52; Matthew 14.22-27),
The
Feeding of the Four Thousand (8.1-10; Matthew 15.32-39),
The Transfiguration (9.1-13;
Matthew 17.1-9).
Moreover, the two events at the
epicentre of the messianic series are contiguous in all three of
the four gospels which record them; remarkably so, and
suggestively of a pattern. This seems to be a clear structural
element which should engage one's intellectual curiosity and
further scrutiny. All three synoptists as well as John highlight
these two central events in terms of a given disparity, which
will be deployed further still, in the organization of the
messianic series. That is, it will account for its chiastic
structure which configures a one-to-one correspondence between
the first and last; second and second last; and third and third
last members. In a text comparable to the Markan pericope which
precedes the recapitulation of the numerical details of the two
Eucharistic miracles common to Mark and Matthew,The Demand
For A Sign, (Mark 8.11-13; Matthew 16.1-4; Luke 11.29-32),
John has:
When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, "Rabbi, when did you come here?" Jesus answered them, "Truly, truly, I say to you , you seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labour for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of man, will give to you; for on him has God the Father set his seal." (John 6.25-27).
The text is not permitted to
interrupt the strict contiguity of the two Transcendental
messianic miracles, the third and third last events of the
completed series, and so it is placed after the second of these,
The Walking On The Water. John develops the first
expression of transcendence given in the epithet 'eternal' (ai)w/nion, v 27, then vv 40, 47), by
repeated incidences of the phrase 'from heaven' (tou~ ou)ranou~, vv 31, 32, 33, 38, 41,
42, 45, 46), as well as repeated usages of 'God' (vv 27, 28, 33,
45), and 'Father' (vv 27, 32, 37, 45, 46). Thus it is certain
enough that he seeks to distinguish the second of the two events
according to the reiteration of the categoreal paradigm. That
means of course, he distinguishes acoustic sentience in affinity
with the future, from that which is inseparably allied with the
past. These two Transcendental, and central messianic miracles,
are the systematic depositions of acoustic memory and acoustic
imagination respectively. And the latter is analogous to the
pure conceptual form space, depicted in the Day 2 rubric.
Even though both are Transcendental in that both, identify
Transcendence ('God the Father'), in keeping with the chiastic
form of the messianic series, John establishes a taxonomical
distinction between them relatively to the subdivision explicit
in the P creation narrative. His gospel includes just three of
the messianic miracles, the other four events are healing
events. And so his arrangement of these seven episodes is not
one of recurrent oscillation from one kind of occasion crossing
to that of 'the other side', so to speak. He employs this marker
of polarity only once, then in the context of the two
Transcendental events at the centre of his series. His series is
thus organized according to a single subdivision as is the P
narrative, since the last three miracle stories as a whole, are
of the same kind as that initiated by The Walking On The
Water. That is, the remaining two events The Man Born
Blind (John 9.1-41), and The Raising Of Lazarus
(11.1-44) are transcendent in kind. They share themes which
resonate with the creation narrative, chiefly the motif of
light, recursively to the beginning of the gospel. The pattern
of the messianic series in the gospels however repeatedly
utilises the crossing motif, resulting as noted in a chiasmos.
When we examine the three episodes in the complete messianic
series, to which I refer as miracles of 'virtual
transcendence' since they are set apart from their
complementary counterparts, the three (Eucharistic) events
of actual immanence, in conformity with the paradigm
transcendence : immanence, or identity : unity, we alight on the
fact that identity is a thematic construct common to all three.
The tone of dread, among other features which they share, also
notably distinguishes them from the Eucharistic miracles. The
latter are uniformly and antithetically pervaded by a mood of
congeniality. This contrast between the three miracles of virtual
transcendence and three of actual immanence
corresponds to the same logical, binary division of the P
creation story, in which we encounter three rubrics (Days) of pure
transcendence and three of 'virtual immanence'.
When we include the two seventh events, the Sabbath on the one
hand, the Eucharist on the other, there is further confirmation
of this pattern securing the morphological congruence of the
stories of beginning (creation) and end (salvation).
Pure/virtual transcendence and actual/virtual immanence now
stand to one another in the ratio of 3 : 4.
All that was missing from both synoptics was the first 'sign' from John,
noteworthy because it was listed as first. This was no more
strange than that John's gospel itself had no comparable account
of The Lord's
Supper. The regularity of the messianic events in all
three synoptics, clearly demarcated by the rhythmical references
to crossings 'to the other side' - yet another formal,
structural index, which sorts into two kinds, the six messianic
miracles congruently with the binary form of the hexameron -
calls for attention as do the several keynotes in the both
miracles of loaves which certify their status as at once germane
to the singularly commonest, and most defining of all Christian
sacraments, the Eucharist. The presence in both Mark and Matthew
of one complete subset, the three messianic miracles of 'virtual
transcendence', coherent in virtue of the primary, prominent,
thematic criterion of identity, as well as several secondary
criteria, might also have motivated thought as to the parallel
coherence of the three Eucharistic messianic miracles. That is,
it too should have suggested the first of the Johannine signs as
an essential member of the same narrative chain in its completed
form.
The
methodological fallacy of 'demythologization' as concerning the
messianic series in particular is its failure to see the forest
for the trees; the treatment of each miracle story of that
series as fully truncated from all others of its kind. This
further complicates the outstanding question regarding the
relation of the two canons to each other, of which the immediate
morphological congruence of the story of beginning, Genesis
1.1-2.4a with that of end, the messianic series, is indubitably
its best of any resolution. But quite apart from the
pathetic incapacity of Bultmann's commentarial oeuvre to concede
any connection whatsoever of John's highly significant story
with others of its genre, a reason
for yet further dissatisfaction must be his oversight of the
several markers with which the evangelist adroitly intersperses
this first great Christological, miracle story. I have already
dealt with Bultmann's laxity in addressing the salience of this
narrative in my discussion of the gospel of Luke. Here I
emphasize the following points in summary form which speak for
its integral role in this section of the gospel.
The link of the Johannine prologue to the P
narrative was more than adequately heralded by its incipient verse - 'In
the beginning...' (E0n a)rxh~?,
John 1.1). This link is extended to the succeeding miracle
story confirmed at its conclusion: 'This, the first of his signs
...' (a)rxh\n tw~n
shmei/wn John
2.11). Further to the same end is the outstanding
parallelism drawn between the two transmutative processes,
the Word becoming flesh and the
water becoming wine: Kai\ o( lo/gov sa\rc e)ge/neto c.f. to\ u(/dwr oi)~non gegenhme/non (John 1.14,
29 emphases added). This is crucial to any understanding
of not just this event, but the complementary messianic,
Christological miracle, The
Transfiguration, and since these first and last
episodes operate inclusively of the six events as a whole,
the same applies to the entire series, and extensively, to
the first creation narrative, in the LXX version of which
we find the verb e)ge/neto as
many as twenty times;
In addition to this, the text refers to the convention of serving the good wine first (prw~ton, 2.10), thus providing yet another marker of continuity between the hymn to the logos and the miracle story;
the threefold mentions of 'the steward of the feast' (a)rxitri/klinov, vv 8, 9, 10) are part of the same strategy, since the first part of that Greek compound again alludes to 'beginning';
the miracle story itself begins with a temporal reference, also allusive to the P narrative: 'On the third day ...' (Kai th~? h9mer/a? th~? tri/th?, 2.1);
further to which, the previous narratives three times use the
phrase 'the next day' (Th~?
e)pau/rion, 1.29, 35, 43). Thus the number
of 'days' immediately prior to, and including the
introduction to the first miracle story amounts to just
six. This complements the use of this same figure in the
narrative itself, concerning the number of jars of
water-wine, and squares also with the number of disciples
mentioned in the calling narratives, including 'the mother
of Jesus' (1.35-21, emphases added.) The P narrative as is
well known, reduces to to the triad insofar as the members
of the hexameron, the six Days of creation proper, are
paired. Moreover the sixth Day comprises the creation of
male and female humans in God's image and likeness,
constructs immediately applicable to the miracle story.
Vindication of the claim that these two
narrative cycles are of unparalleled theological value is
also immediate in that the correlation of the Sabbath and
the Eucharist necessarily both confirm a theology of death,
and in that the mutual coherence of the series attests the
doctrine of the Trinity. These last members of their series
dispose them as finally sevenfold, but without any
modification of their radically binary and triadic
morphology. How should we interpret this analogy subtended
by the stories of 'beginning and end' as anything other than
theologies of the threefold nature of God à propos of the
categoreal paradigm transcendence : immanence ('the heavens
and the earth')?
To interpret the P narrative in Trinitarian terms does not
smack of the 'Christianization' of a text which must remain
the exclusive property of Judaism. The failure to realize
the accord between the two narratives of creation and
salvation has hamstrung theological understanding for
centuries: 'Learning preserves the errors of the past, as
well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public
dangers, although they are necessities.' (A.N. Whitehead.) I
have therefore emphasized their essentially correlative,
semantic interdependence as the hallmark of biblical theology and
the inexorable commitment of philosophical theology.
Either text as testimony is incomplete without the other.
Interdisciplinary boundaries become specious when we admit
to consideration the syntax internally sustained by the
first narrative and the telos towards which it directs
itself. The presence of
the J creation narrative in the Tanakh, with its strained
effort to complement the theology of transcendence of the
P story with at least, the appearance of a theology of
immanence, demonstrates this fact conspicuously. The
former taken in isolation is incomplete, and theologically
deficient. A beginning
without an end is no better than coitus
interruptus.
To deprive that testimony of its context and
to treat not only the messianic miracle stories but also
the Eucharist as wholly independent units, void of any
referential affinity with what is their 'precedent', in
terms of both form and content, is to deprive both
narratives of meaning. By form and content I do not mean
simply the aesthetic and logical integrity of the
six-sevenfold narratives of the messianic series; I mean
the consummate total of the narratives, their 'beginning
and end' as guaranteed by the initial inclusio of
scripture, 'the heavens and the earth', and as by other
factors. These co-ordinated texts remain the single most
systematic depositions of anthropological and
Christological doctrines at our disposal. They have
proven to be stumbling blocks because of the elevation
of analytic tendencies in biblical criticism, without
any compensatory synthesis. The unrestricted detachment
of the miracle stories from their contexts without any
constructive grasp of the latter, has been nothing but a
disaster. In short: 'We murder to dissect.' The
loss of meaning for theology in general has followed in
the wake of their neglect. This was astoundingly
dim-witted, given that, even at first blush, the
uniformity of their sequences in the gospels, and the
unanimity of the numerical details in the several
accounts alone could have engendered more interest.
These facts speak for the likelihood of their
transmission in written rather than oral form. It is
even possible that they may rival the vaunted antiquity
of 1 Thessalonians.
By referring to 'Ad Fontes And The Obvious Unseen(s)',
the first part of which, "Back to the sources", was one of
the rallying cries of the Reformation, I mean precisely
that. I mean to return in the first place, to the gospels,
rather than Paul, and thereafter, to the first creation
story, rather than the second, to where the gospels
comprehensively redirect us. And the primacy of the P
creation narrative over that which follows it, the fact that
it is before the J account
which Paul adopted wholesale, speaks for its status. This is
in keeping with the fact of its isomorphism with the
messianic series analogously to which it functions as
beginning to end, first to last, Alpha to Omega. That is,
Genesis 1.1-2.4a stands in tandem with the single New
Testament serial narrative present in varying measures, in
all four gospels, which testifies to the theology of
creation. At least one theologian in the last century has
not lost sight of the value of the first creation narrative:
The first chapter of the Bible is one of the great pieces of world literature. All questions which have been directed to this first chapter of the Bible, all doubts as to what is there is 'right', all emotional explanations that it is utterly outmoded, in nowise affect the validity of what is there. When one hears this chapter read aloud, and in an appropriate context, one realizes that something has been expressed that has never really been said before nor since.
The uniqueness of this prelude to the Bible can be explained up to a point. The poetic prose of the strophes brings before us with overpowering simplicity the world in its totality. It has succeeded in classical fashion in uniting together what is said of the world as a whole and what is said of its details. It speaks of the whole, 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth'; it speaks of the details, of sea and land, of trees and flowers, of men and animals, of sun, moon, and stars. But that would not be adequate to explain the unique effect of what is said at the beginning of the Bible. Its tremendous effect lies in this: that the sweep of the whole world in time and in space comes to a consummate expression in a work of art of the highest order: in time, in the succession of the six days of Creation reaching their goal on the seventh; in space, in the peculiar construction of the chapter which, beginning with a sentence that encompasses the whole, unfolds everything in heaven and on earth as the succession of days runs its course. The achievement in this one place in world literature of so complete a reflection of the world as a whole in both its temporal and spacial dimensions is by no means fortuitous. But one can only see this when one views this first chapter of the Bible in the context on the reflection of the world as a whole in the overall history of mankind. Reflection on the world as a whole occurs only in the reflection on Creation in the overall history of early man. In other words: the world as a whole can only be understood in the context of its coming into being. Early man confronted the world of his time in its quite incomprehensible complexity and variety. The world was a whole only in its coming into being as such; it was grasped as a totality in the reflection on Creation. (Westermann, Claus, Schöpfung, Kreuz-Verlag, Stuttgart, Germany, 1971, English translation, Creation, by John J. Scullion, S.J., Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1974, pp 36, 37.)
If then the first Christology of the messianic
series portends death in relation to sexual love, then the
last reiterates this. Jesus is identified as "The Beloved" in
the last event, recalling the first with which it is paired.
The Eucharist complies with this tendency to converge Eros and Thanatos.
Although that event is not instituted on the Sabbath, it
clearly corresponds analogically to that particular day
of the creation series and to no other. If we read, as
correctly we may do, the events of the J story to ensue in
time upon those of the first, then 'the Fall' so-called,
transpires within the temporal orbit of the last of the seven
days; the humans having been created on the immediately
previous day. This gives still more purchase to the implicit
reference to death intimated by the Sabbath rubric which
informs an extended section of Hebrews concerning the
same. The lifeless and entombed body of Jesus during the
Sabbath will acquire further meaningfulness by dint of these
connections.
Although it differs markedly from most other New Testament
texts, and yet shares certain middle Platonist tendencies with
the gospel of John, I mention Hebrews here in passing.
It provides as do the gospels, a theological understanding of
death in relation to Christ thoroughly discrepant from what we
found in the Paul of Romans and 1 Corinthians. And since
it utilizes the Sabbath as conceived in the P creation
narrative, it has something in common with the messianic
series, even if only notionally. Hebrews does not
recapitulate the J narrative. It does not presume a
postlapsarian world, although it mentions 'disobedience' and
'unbelief'. The disobedience referred to is certainly not that
of the story of the Fall. Rather, it envisages death in terms
comparable to the inferences in the creation story; that is,
in a positive light: as well-earned rest after one's labors. I
quote the text at length since it refers also to Christ's
humanity in terms at variance with the image in De Civitate
Dei of
Augustine of Hippo, who in the footsteps of Paul, seized upon
the second creation story, and whose legacy in this matter,
has served unwittingly or not, to eclipse the value and
signigifance of the first. (We shall return to Augustine's
interpretation of the J narrative à propos of the issue of
psychogenesis, that is, the generation of the soul.) The
relevant text from Hebrews begins with midrash on Psalm 95.7-11:
Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, "Today, when you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the wilderness, where your fathers put me to the test and saw my works for forty years. Therefore I was provoked with that generation, and said, 'They always go astray in their hears; they have not known my ways.' As I swore in my wrath, 'They shall never enter my rest (kata/pausi/n mou).'" (Hebrews 3.7-11.)
And to whom did he swear that they should never enter his rest (kata/pausin au)tou~), but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.
Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest (kata/pausin au)tou~) remains, let us fear lest any of you be judged to have failed to reach it. For good news (eu)hggelisme/noi) came to us just as to them; but the message which they heard (o( lo/gov th~v a)koh~v) did not benefit them, because it did not meet with faith in the hearers. For we who have believed enter that rest (ka/tapausin), as he has said, "As I swore in my wrath, 'They shall never enter my rest (ka/tapausi/n mou),'" although his works were finished form the foundation of the world (a)po\ katabolh~v ko/smou). For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day (e(bdo/mhv) in this way, "And God rested on the seventh day from all his works." (e)pausen o( qeo\v e)n th~? h(me/ra? th~? e(bdo/mh? a)po\ pa/ntwn tw~n e)/rgwn au)tou~) And again in this place he said, "They shall never enter my rest." (kata/pausi/n mou). Since therefore it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, again he sets a certain day, "Today," saying through David so long afterward, in the words already quoted, "Today, when you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts." For if Joshua had given them rest (I)esou~v kate/pausen), God would not speak later of another day. So then, there remains a sabbath rest for the people of God (a)polei/petai sabbati/smov tw~? law~? tou~ qeou~); for whoever enters God's rest (kata/pausin au)tou~) also ceases from his labors as God did from his. (Hebrews 3.18-4.10).
For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. (Hebrews 4.15).
The extensive paraenesis with its
constant iteration of the Sabbath rest motif is consonant with
the gospels. They too, clearly and uniformly reformulate the
first creation narrative, not the second. This of course reclaims death from its portrayal
by classical theologies of 'the Fall', reliant upon a
literal reading of the J creation narrative, beginning with
that of Paul. It thereby accords with the doctrine of
incarnation: 'the Word' is made flesh, not after the event
of a putative incursion of death into the created order, but
rather, with it, just as the same person must
necessarily suffer death. The creation does not initially
miscarry due to the disobedience of the first human couple,
if indeed there ever was just such a single couple.
The created order does not founder due to the misdeeds of
the humans who are certainly its final, and not its first
accomplishment. The incarnation of 'the Word'
'through whom all things were made' is
there 'in the beginning', always, already. He does not come
to the rescue of the world in the fashion of a deus ex
machina, as its correction, its ransom, returning it
to the potential of its former, pristine perfection
subsequently to its perdition. There was no pristine
perfection to begin with. He is with the world from
its inception, its 'beginning' - as is The Holy Spirit - and
he has assumed responsibility for its ultimate destiny, and
thus for the phenomenon of death. The works of creation are
not the exclusive business of Transcendence ("The Father"),
any more than are those of salvation the exclusive remit of
the Word. The same must apply to the process of
sanctification and The Holy Spirit.
The works of Creation are fitted into an overall time scheme, part of which is the procession of the days of work into a day of rest. The sanctification of the seventh day forms part of the time established with Creation: the days of work have their goal in a day which is different from them. There is more here than a reference to the Sabbath as it was later instituted in Israel. There is an order established for mankind according to which time is divided into the everyday and the special, and the everyday reaches its goal in the special. The work of Creation which began with the division of light from darkness ends with yet another division. The very existence of all that has been created is determined by the polarity of night and day. God has built into the succession of ordinary days a movement which is a gift to the creature which has been created in his image. The ordinary days flow into a special day. The course of human history which was set in motion with the conclusion of Creation by the sanctification of the seventh day is no longer a monotonous succession in the monotonous rhythm of life; it runs to its goal just like the days of the week. What is peculiar to the holy day in the course of everyday happenings is that it points to the goal of the creature which God has created in his image. The work which has been laid upon man is not his goal. His goal is the eternal rest which has been suggested in the rest of the seventh day. (Westermann, pp 64.65.)
5. THEOLOGICAL BODIES: FROM GOD TO GAIA AND BACK AGAIN
Man is an animal organism with (like others) an unmistakably bisexual disposition. The individual corresponds to a fusion of two symmetrical halves, of which, according to some investigators, one is purely male and the other female. It is equally possible that each half was originally hermaphrodite. Sex is a biological fact which, although it is of extraordinary importance in mental life, is hard to grasp psychologically. We are accustomed to say that every human being displays both male and female instinctual impulses, needs and attributes; but though anatomy, it is true, can point out the characteristic of maleness and femaleness, psychology cannot. (Freud, Sigmund, Des Unbehagen in der Kultur, (1930), ET., Civilization And Its Discontents, James Strachey (Ed.), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985, Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 12, pp 295-6, fn. 1.)
Freud here as elsewhere (for example,
Three Essays, PFL Vol. 2, p 147 ff.), laments this
deficiency of 'psychology' quite candidly. Such an open
admission is however, inevitable, given the centrality of
sexuality to his thought. The problem may be symptomatic
of a general vulnerability of psychoanalysis. Neither the possible
rehabilitation of Freud to metaphysics nor the obverse
can skirt these issues. Not that Freud himself
scrupled to launch metapsychology into an existence of
however tenuous a sort, notwithstanding that as the
self-avowed 'godless Jew', he protested more than loudly
enough his own unbelief in 'transcendence'. At best, he seems to have been
wholly dismissive of, if not wholly antagonistic towards
the phenomenon of religion generally.
In spite of the metapsychological element
of psychoanalysis, Freud expresses certain confidence in
the conviction that it operates according to science. This
he never elaborates, and the epistemological status of
both psychoanalysis and analytical psychology after Jung,
in spite of his similar claims, remains at issue. Jung's
attitude to religion is diametrically opposed to that of
his onetime confrère. In some Christian quarters, he is
welcomed; others deem him a crypto-gnostic, and heterodox
to the Christian cause, just as he became to that of
Freud. Arguments about the epistemological status of the
output of both writers, which place them on an equal
footing with science, are scarcely likely to convince
contemporary philosophers of mind. This indicates one
precise point at which either man might have allowed more
of science than literary art to influence the future
course of their conceptual schemata; namely the question
of the role of perception and that of the relatedness of
the psychophysical and the spatiotemporal, two key
categories of biblical metaphysics qua
epistemology. But if either figure treats these at all, he
does so only accidentally.
Jung's answer to the role of the anthropic
category, the functioning of the concepts 'male and
female' in human psychology which necessarily must address
sexual dimorphism, and arguably, sexual polymorphism, is
even less convincing than Freud's. I wish to state
plainly, that these strands in the work of neither is in
the final analysis compatible with Christian doctrine.
Jung's use of the term 'transcendent' in 'transcendent
function' - and likewise, the term 'transcendental'
- is on a par with what we shall directly observe in
the examples of feminist critiques of the philosophical
tradition in the West. It is difficult to attach any
genuine semantic to it because it has been eviscerated of
its theological and/or metaphysical content. With a
penchant both tedious and ornate for Graecisms and
Latinisms equal to that of Freud, intended no doubt to
bolster the claims regarding the epistemological status of
'Jungian' psychology, just as those of 'Freudian'
psychoanalysis, for his part, he attributed an unconscious
feminine aspect, the anima, to the male, and and
unconscious masculine aspect, animus, to the
female. (For an abstract concerning which see the
following: The
Relation Between The Ego And The Unconscious. Part
2. Individuation. 11. Anima And Animus.
It is doubtful that the descriptions of man as 'more
objective and rational, woman as more subjective and
emotional' will pass muster in the post-feminist era.)
In the final analysis there
is as little reason to believe Freudian theory
regarding the 'psyche' to be constituted by id, ego and
superego as there is to believe Jungian postulates
concerning anima and animus. Questions
regarding the roles of the conceptual forms symbolic
masculine and symbolic feminine in the consciousnesses of
both male and female humans, bring to light the
validity of any differentiation between the male 'and'
female soul, stemming from sexual dimorphism. But there is
yet another, and equally pressing dilemma we have to
consider: the denumeration of the 'soul', that of
phylogeny and ontogeny. Does each human
individual possess its own soul, if we aver as essential
to psychology as to social science, and of course to
religion in general, the dilemma of 'the
individual in community'?
My preoccupation here is not the bodily
Christ in relation to Eros,
but in relation to Thanatos,
whom we see portrayed in The
Transfiguration, a narrative recurring immediately
to the hexameron, and to the Day 1 rubric in particular.
But it is difficult to sever the former from the latter as
evinced in the Johannine text of the former, and its
reference to the crucifixion. Thus in the first miracle
story in John which envisions Christ-Eros, the
heavenly bridegroom, we find not only mention of the
mother of Jesus, but the wonderfully ironic riposte of her
son to her intervention in the proceedings after the
supply of wine has been exhausted:
And Jesus said to her, "O woman what have you to do with me? (ti/ e)moi\ kai\ soi/, gu/nai;) My hour has not yet come." (John 2.4).
The Greek is acerbic and succinct,
bordering on the abrupt, and consisting of almost half the
words of the English translation. The story is not about
waters for purification, but about wine; that is to say,
not about the symbolic masculine, but the symbolic
feminine. Here then, Jesus ironically characterizes
himself in these very terms; in terms of the symbolic
feminine. The same two symbols, water and wine John
redeploys in his account of the death of Jesus (19.34),
making good the second half of the dominical logion.
This bolsters my contention that the death of Jesus
concerns the anthropic category in its virtually immanent
form as male and female, of
which Eve and not Adam is the symbol. The first Johannine
miracle narrative is indeed one of the best opportunities
in the New Testament, arguing for the ordination of women,
and yet as far as I know, it has been ignored as such. Its
startling feminine self-characterization of Jesus, or at
least, his characterization of his own and our own soma,
the psychophysical, the apparatus of the body in such
terms, first suggested in the Johannine portrait of
Nathanael, is further corroborated by that evangelist's
brief but unmistakable references to a further two
disciples, Andrew and Phillip, in The Feeding Of The
Five thousand. The same two were also mentioned in
the Johannine narrative of the commissioning of the
disciples, in closest association with Nathanael. These
facts belong to the gender-typological differential which
sorts pure/virtual transcendence from actual/virtual
immanence. That is, by dint of its association with the
Eucharist-Sabbath complex, the anthropic and
Pneumatological category, male : female, must be
considered pertinent
to the emergent theology of death in the narratives, a
point to which we shall return.
In the same vein, Matthew, to his everlasting credit,
refers to the feminine at the conclusions of both feeding
miracles in his gospel:
And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children. (Matthew 14.21);
Those who ate were four thousand men, besides women and children. (Matthew 15.38).
The theologies of actual immanence,
the three Eucharistic miracle stories and the Eucharist
itself, are typologically feminine. Their theological
import is normative for the second part of the P
narrative. It accords with the role and status of Eve in
the J story. She, not Adam, is the primary persona in the J
story of 'the Fall'. She is the last of God's creations,
and she represents for that author, the ultimate
achievement of the Creator's work, just as the same
category of symbolic feminine conceptualized in the Day
6 rubric, is the teleological aim of the second half of
that narrative. If the second story honors Eve, the female human in
this way, it is because she is the final exemplification
of the value beauty, in virtue of just which property,
the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
is desirable. I have commented at length on the role of
vision and the value of beauty in this story.
Just so, she is represented in The Apocalypse in
comparable terms; first as the woman of the vision in
chapter 12, then as the bride of the Lamb-the heavenly
Jerusalem. The deference due to the theologies of actual immanence
by the J creation narrative, and by the second part of
the P narrative, reinforces my contention that Paul has
not fully understood its theological cast, immanence as
distinct from transcendence, and that Eve, 'the mother
of all living', is the actual nucleus about which
the story gravitates. Therefore to cite Adam as the type
of Christ seems to me less than tenable. And worse, that
to conceive of the initial disobedience of the
primordial couple as the cause not only of death, but of
all the ills attendant upon biological existence, even
more so. On this accounting is the same, single (?)
figure culpable of the entropic decay of the universe in
its entirety? Is the second law of thermodynamics
personally attributable to him? Is the ultimate heat
death of the universe the fault of Adam, 'O wretched man
that he is'?
There can be no reconciliation of any kind of the P
narrative of creation with evolutionary theory. That the
animals are created after the
creation of the humans precludes any such accommodation.
We now know from the visible fossil record, and from
carbon dating, that our sub-human forebears were just
that. They lived and died prior to the advent of
humankind in evolutionary time. The propagation of the
species always and already guaranteed the death of its
ancestors. In a spatially finite world, progeny in
itself demands the death of its progenitors. These are
simple facts; there was no prelapsarian world; no earth
in which humans were first created and were responsible
for a monumental miscarriage of the created order
through disobediance to a God who walked and talked - as
did the serpent itself - in the garden of Eden. To
believe which is to attempot to fly, and so to flounder,
in the face of reason, and to dishonour belief itself.
Furthermore the J story
problematizes what is fundamental to the theology of
Sabbath-Eucharist; the fact that all living creatures
depend on other living entities for their survival.
Hence death is presupposed in the P story, even if it
does not mention the consumption by higher animals of
other such creatures. There is no postlapsarian world
because there is no prelapsarian world: there is only
the world as we know it; that in which death is already
a fait
accompli. To treat the story of the Fall as
historical fact is counter to authentic faith. Faith is
underpinned by the desire-to-know; commensurately,
knowing is underpinned by the will-to-believe. The
failure to reckon with the insights of evolutionary
theory in the final analysis, not only flies in the face
of reason; it is unethical. These modes of
intentionality, faith and the desire-to-know, are
intimately necessary to one another as exemplifications
of the same reality, the Word, according to the two
orders of consciousness, the conscious and the
aconscious. This is the delivery of the texts and the
explication for the pluralistic soteriologies and
eschatologies of the four gospels which consist
nevertheless as one whole.
Thus predation and the consumption of living things was
and is the order of the day for existence; since life
itself persists at the expense of life itself. The
pervasiveness of death in this context, like asexual and
sexual reproduction, is a necessary concomitant of
biological existence. These facts must be taken in
accord with the link between The Son and The Spirit. As
proper to the contours of the present, the hic et
nunc, they are immediately relevant to the meaning
of Sabbath-Eucharist. There is no merit in accepting at
face value the aetiology of death in the J narrative. It
is less than a myth. It foreshadows the theology of
immanence; that is, it prefigures the disclosures of the
messianic miracle series, particularly the theology of
actual immanence. And to treat it as even more than a
myth, as an actual historical event, when it is less
than the same, is both idolatrous and unconscionable.
I can no more accept doctrines of the Fall
and 'original sin' which impute the cause of death to a
single, primordial, human male than I can believe the
tortured logic with which Augustine painted himself into a
theological corner, and which Roman Catholic and
Protestant dogmatics also upheld:
The punishment itself, Augustine continues, "effected in their original nature a change for the worse." Augustine derived the nature of that change from an idiosyncratic interpretation of Romans 5:12. The Greek text reads, "Through one man [or "because of one man," di' e(no\v a)nqrw/pou] sin entered the world, and through sin, death; and thus death came upon all men, in that [(e)/f' w~(?] all sinned." John Chrysostom, like most Christians, took this to mean that Adam's sin brought death into the world, and death came upon all because "all sinned." But Augustine read the passage in Latin, and so either ignored or was unaware of the connotations of the Greek original; thus he misread the last phrase as referring to Adam. Augustine insisted that it meant that "death came upon all men, in whom all sinned" - that the sin of that "one man," Adam, brought upon humanity not only universal death, but also universal, and inevitable, sin. Augustine uses the passage to deny that human beings have free moral choice, which Jews and Christians had traditionally regarded as the birthright of humanity made "in God's image." Augustine declares, on the contrary, that the whole human race inherited from Adam a nature irreversibly damaged by sin. "For we all were in that one man, since all of us were that one man who fell into sin through the woman who was made from him."
Pagels adds a footnote to indicate the
source, Augustine, De
Civitate Dei, 13,14, and continues:
How can one imagine that millions of individuals not yet born were "in Adam" or, in any sense, "were" Adam? Anticipating objections that would reduce his argument to absurdity, Augustine declares triumphantly that, although "we did not yet have individually created and apportioned forms in which to live as individuals," what did exist already was the "nature of the semen from which we were to be propagated." That semen itself, Augustine argues, already "shackled by the bond of death," transmits the damage incurred by sin. Hence, Augustine concludes, every human being ever conceived through semen already is born contaminated with sin. Through this astonishing argument, Augustine intends to prove that every human being is in bondage not only from birth but indeed from the moment of conception. And since he takes Adam as a corporate personality, Augustine applies his account of Adam's experience, disrupted by the first sin, to every one of his offspring (except, of course, to Christ, conceived, Augustine ingeniously argued, without semen). (Pagels p 109.)
Further to which she remarks:
Augustine believes that by defining spontaneous sexual desire as the proof and penalty of original sin he has succeeded in implicating the whole human race, except, of course, for Christ. Christ alone of all humankind, Augustine explains, was born without libido - being born, he believes, without the intervention of semen that transmits its effects. But the rest of humankind issues from a procreative process that, ever since Adam, has sprung wildly out of control, marring the whole of human nature. (Ibid p 112.)
In him was life, and the life was the light of men (to\ fw~v tw~n a)nqrw/pwn). The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (kai\ to\ fw~v e)n th~? skoti/a? fai/nei, kai\ h( skoti/a au)tou~ ou) kate/laben.)
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light.
The true light that enlightens every man (to\ fw~v to\ a)lhqino/n) was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not.(John 1.4-10.)
The same antithetical binary of light and
darkness will feature in the last and greatest of the
Johannine signs, The
Death Of Lazarus (11.1-44).
That narrative will consistently refer to the intervals of
day and night (vv 5, 9, 10, 17, 24 ('the last day'), 39).
The phrase 'Six days before the Passover' (12.1) begins
the subsequent pericope, The
Anointing At Bethany. Surely then, this Johannine
miracle narrative speaks in the same voice as does the
actual messianic miracle in which that series culminates.
The same Greek nouns for 'light' and 'darkness' occur in
the LXX version of Genesis 1.3-5, the Day 1 story, as does
the verb e)ge/neto three times,
a verb denoting becoming, change transformation, which we
noted in the first miracle story and in the prologue of
the fourth gospel. (The verb in this form notably and
musically punctuates the (LXX) creation narrative: 1.3, 5
(bis), 6, 8 (bis), 9, 11, 13 (bis),
19 (bis), 20, 23 (bis), 24, 30, 31 (bis);
as does the imperative - genh/qetw / genhqh/twsan
- 'Let there be ...': 1.3, 6, 14. Where the verb
occurs twice, as conclusively, in the six cases marking
the hexameron, it refers to the phrase 'evening and
morning'. Equally remarkable, is the fact that this
epithet does not frame the seventh day, which nevertheless
is numbered.) These facts support the identification of a
theology of death in the P narrative, as in the last of
the miracles of the messianic series, The
Transfiguration, and John's equivalent, also
the final miracle in that gospel, The Death
Of Lazarus.
Similarly, the analogous relation of the messianic and
creation series, and indeed The
Transfiguration, conduce to the presence of a
theology in which death is a major construal of the texts
viewed in combination as they are intended to be seen. But
this is not the notion of death as it is for Paul. Neither
the story of Lazarus nor The
Transfiguration deals
with the conceptual apparatus of Pauline recapitulation
theology, nor with any presupposition basic to the Fall.
That the Johannine miracle story contains references to
the anointing of Jesus (11.1, 2 and 12.1-8); that it
mentions Jesus' love for 'Martha and her sister and
Lazarus' (11.5); that it pictures Jesus' grief at the
death of the latter in the starkest way possible, these
also tell for the same coincidence of love and death, Eros and Thanatos,
on which we have already commented, and which is germane
to Eucharistic theology, just as it is to the Eucharistic hic et
nunc which
is qualified by death as necessary to the sustenance of
life.
Like the P narrative, the last sign story in John deploys
both antithetical constructs: the light : darkness of Day
1 as well as the day : night of the corresponding Day 4.
Even though in the former case h( skoti/a is not used,
it is likely enough that the both Christological rubrics
are in mind, as is suggested by the metaphorical use of
"stumble" and "the light is not in him":
Jesus answered, "Are there not twelve hours in a day? If any one walks in the day, he does not stumble because he sees the light of this world. (ou) prosko/ptei, o/(ti to\ fw~v tou~ ko/smou tou/tou ble/pei). But if any one walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him." (e)a\n de/ tiv peripath~? e)n th~? nukti/, prosko/ptei, o(/ti to\ fw~v ou)k e)/stin e)n au)tw~?, John 11.9-10).
The previous miracle story, The Man
Born Blind, contains the dominical saying '"I am the
light of the world"' (John 9.5), although it was
prefigured in the pericope appended as postscript to The Woman
Caught In Adultery (8.12). This
penultimate miracle story similarly uses the light
leitmotif of the final episode, pursuant to what we first
found in the prologue and the creation story; and
similarly to The
Death Of Lazarus, uses the day : night binary of the
Day 4 rubric:
Again Jesus spoke to them saying, "I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life." (e)gw/ ei)mi to\ fw~v tou~ ko/smou o( a0kolouqw~n e)moi\ ou) mh\ peripath/sh? e)n th~? skoti/a?, all' e)/cei to\ fw~v th~v zwh~v, 8.12).
Jesus answered, "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him. We must work the works of him who sent me, while it is day; night comes, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." (fw~v ei)mi tou~ ko/smou, John 9.3-5).
The two series, messianic and Johannine
signs, support each other formally as well as sharing a
significant amount of material. Their ultimate members
indicate that the Christologies in the creation and
messianic narratives are of preeminent importance in any
bid to determine the theology of death in those narratives
as wholes. But that this theology is not radically other
than the aetiology regarding death which Paul advocates is
inadmissible. It is fair to say that his thought in this
matter, is his alone as well as being unsupported by any
criteria such as Boers mentions, whereby we might deem it
to be systematic. Abandoning his wholesale literal
acceptance of the narrative concerning Adam and the
incursion of death into the created order, must be a first
step in the renewal of articulating the relevance of time
and death as core components in biblical theology, for
Paul's understanding will not square with the testimony of
the gospels and the P narrative in unison.
If then the J narrative accentuates immanence and the
feminine, if indeed Eve and not Adam, given that she is
the last of God's acts
of creation, is the
primary subject of the narrative, fully
exemplifying the beautiful precisely in her
Pneumatological capacity of life-bearing, then the text
necessarily yields to the definitive theologies of
immanence as these are the responsibility of the New
Testament. The Apocalypse resumes and reformulates both
creation narratives in the vision of chapter 12, that of
the woman with child. It does so in a manner similar to
the description of the 'four living creatures'. In keeping
with John's penchant for the eclectic, these have aspects
in common with both the 'seraphim' of Isaiah's vision,
and Ezekiel's 'cherubim'. So too, the author elides
both the P and the J narratives; the woman and the dragon
hail from J, the sun, moon and stars, from P. John's
experience as visionary suggests that
he is not writing prophecy qua historiography.
In this respect, its epistemic status is much more cogent
than the story of the Fall. It functions as the
fulfillment the second creation narrative, and in fact,
that narrative it understands as proto-mythological:
The introduction to the vision - 'And a great sign appeared in heaven' (Kai\ shmei~on me/ga w)/fqh e)n tw~? ou)ranw~?, Apocalypse 12.1) - qualifies the experience epistemically, which the term 'sign' reinforces. The same form of the same verb is used of the appearance of the red dragon, presented as the foe to the woman. The aorist, passive, indicative, third person singular of the verb o(ra/w ('to see'), w)/fqh, is used in two of the synoptic accounts of The Transfiguration of the appearance of Elijah with/and Moses (Mark 9.4, Matthew 17.3). Its three occurrences in only this particular form in The Apocalypse, are concentrated here: at 11.19, the record of the seventh trumpet which leads directly to 12.1, concerning the woman, and again at 12.3, concerning the dragon; the last two incidences being combined with shmei~on. It is not simply the dragon, to whom John refers as the 'serpent' (dra/kwn - o)/fiv, c.f. LXX Gen 3.1vv) which invokes the second creation narrative. The woman as the chief agent in the drama and the combination of imagery from the Day 4 rubric, sun, moon and stars, tells for the same. As central to The Apocalypse, she, the second, or wholly final Eve, is the manifest of its axiological-theological concerns, to wit, beauty. We shall return to this idea in relation to the Christian eschatology revealed in the series of seals, since there is a clear connection between the numbered sealed servants, 144,000, the number of the tribes to which they belong, and the woman's crown of twelve stars.And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars (gunh\ peribeblhme/nh to\n h(/lion, kai\ h( selh/nh u(poka/tw tw~n podw~n au)th~v kai\ e)pi th~v kefalh~v au)th~v ste/fanov a)ste/rwn dw/deka); she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery. And another portent appeared in heaven, a great red dragon, with seven heads, and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth; (Apocalypse 12.1-4).
If women are not out there engaging in their own projects and exploits, they are reduced to mere immanence or immersion in life. There is no middle zone between transcendence and immanence.' (pp 98, 99),conflicts directly with Christian revelation, and is at once roundly denied by the doctrine of incarnation as by a host of other precepts, chiefly the apparently paradoxical delineation of the aconscious, whose conceptual (transcendental) pole functions according to virtual immanence, and whose immanent, that is, perceptual pole functions according to virtual transcendence.
When women began to push for an independent creative existence in the second half of the nineteenth century, one of the battles that faced them was the right to study the male nude on the same terms as male entrants into the same profession. ...Surprisingly perhaps, very little reference has been made to genitalia in 'body theologies' so-called. And if here then, I am essentially talking about male and female human genitalia, it is quite simply because the P narrative does the same. There of course, the references are 'eucalyptic' rather than 'apocalyptic', covered rather than uncovered; veiled rather than unveiled. Nonetheless these veiled references in the Day 3 rubric are fundamental to the two narrative cycles, creation series and messianic series. That rubric posits the two sexual forms of the animal-human body in terms of their genital dispositions. In this much it anticipates the theology of haptic-somatic semiotic forms. Phallos and uterus are semeia unlike any other. In the first place, except in anomalous cases, no single human body contains both, although in the plant and sub-human animal kingdoms, this does occur, sequential hermaphrodites being much more common that simultaneous hermaphrodites. Secondly, there is an explicit bearing between the semeion and the conceptual form signified: the phallos is an index of the symbolic masculine and the uterus of the symbolic feminine. In all other ten instances of haptic semiotics, the conceptual or perceptual components of consciousness are signified by members of the body not immediately represented in the same way. For example, the hand is the semiotic bearer of haptic memory; the dermal body, the skin in its entirety is the semeion for haptic imagination. The discussion of haptic semiotics was given in LUKE 2 Semeihaptika: The Body And Touch.
By the time women began to achieve something approaching equality with men in the art world, the study of the nude had long since fallen into disuse and was no longer a standard means of training artists.
The rise of feminist art, from the mid-1970s onwards, did not do much to change this situation, though one of the pioneers of the movement, Judy Chicago (b. 1939), has made some fine studies of male nudes, one of which is reproduced in this book. The reasons for this are complex. One is the visceral distaste for all nude representations which inspired many feminists. If the female nude chiefly aroused their ire, then the male nude also attracted condemnation, since in the eyes of some feminists every form of nude representation was an expression of patriarchal control on the part of the artist or photographer who made it, just as all varieties of sexual intercourse were to be seen as a form of rape. Alternatively, if this version was not acceptable, then images of naked males could be seen as threatening icons of masculine potency. That is, if male nudes in paintings and photographs were not a form of rape, then they threatened rape. This form of feminism offers in another guise a revival of the old puritan fear of the body. (Edward Lucie-Smith, Adam: The Male Figure In Art, Rizzoli, New York, 1998, pp 12-14.)
The individuality of entities is just as important as their community. The topic of religion is individuality in community. (A. N. Whitehead, Religion In The Making, New American Library, New York, 1974, p 86.)We have already had to consider the radical, that is, categoreal, difference between ontogeny and phylogeny. Effectively, it serves to distinguish the gospels into these two very kinds, following their accentuation of either transcendence as is true of both Matthew and John, or immanence, as per Mark and Luke. Additionally each of the three Trinitarian titles, 'the beginning and the end', 'the first and the last', and 'the Alpha and the Omega' amount to the same, since they correspond to the pattern in which modes of intentionality are conjoined. These are: (1) instrumental relations formulated in the arrangement of the four taxa, which begin with conative modes and end with cognitive modes, for example, the instrumental relation of will to belief; (2) analogous relations stemming from the conceptual and perceptual analogues, for example the relation of faith (belief) to desire-to-know; and (3) supervenient relations, for example the supervenience of knowledge-of-will upon desire, or that of knowing upon desire-to-know, and so on. Every one of these is equally the relation of the one to the many or of the many to the one. Relations of instrumentality and of prevenience-supervenience both reflect the fundamental dichotomy of individual and society, along with its innate dilemma. Analogous relations do not, thus faith and desire-to-know are both ontogenic in kind, and will-to-believe and knowing are both phylogenic.
It is no paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.The designation of temporality in accordance with the categoreal paradigm, transcendence : immanence, which results in the distinction future : past respectively, analogously to the components responsible for intentionality, the twelve categoreal forms, conceptual and perceptual, is inherently eschatological precisely because of its inherent temporality. In each case two forms of intentionality, one Christological, and the other Transcendental, demarcate one and the same temporal domain: the distal past, and the proximal past as for immanence, and the distal future and the proximal future as for transcendence. The distal past is the province equally proper to will-to-believe and desire. The former is phylogenic the latter ontogenic, such that their relation consists equally of the many and the one. The proximal past is circumscribed by knowing, phylogenic in nature, and belief-in-desire, ontogenic in nature, to the same effect, thus relating the many and the one, eschatologically, or as we may say, in virtue of temporality.
The fear of speculation, the ostensible rush from the theoretical to the practical, brings about the same shallowness in action that it does in knowledge. It is by studying a strictly theoretical philosophy that we become most acquainted with Ideas, and only Ideas provide action with vigour and ethical significance.
Daly's best known phrase—a summation of her essential perspective—was, "Since God is male, the male is God" (first appearing in "The Qualitative Leap Beyond Patriarchal Religion"; Quest 1, 1974). Roland Mushat Frye, in a chapter titled, "On Praying 'Our Father': The Challenge of Radical Feminist Language for God," (The Politics of Prayer: Feminist Language and the Worship of God (1992), ed.Helen Hull Hitchcock; pp 209-228), wrote, "Like most slogans, this one minimized evidence while increasing conviction, and it has served as a powerful rallying cry for radical feminism. ... Through her writings, [Daly] probably contributed as much as anyone to establishing the radical feminist attitude toward traditional Christian language for God."I have already countered this war cry, one which bluntly avoids any appreciation of the relational, by means of my constant and systematic references to 'symbolic masculine' and 'symbolic feminine', and my stated conviction that both sexes are subsumable under both categories, meaning that there are biological males and females belonging to either category. Daly represents an extreme example of the silence and failure of polemicizing, feminist criticism à propos of the transfigured Eve, whom I take to be the chief protagonist of The Apocalypse. In signature adversarial style, and macho to macho, measure for measure, rebarbative rodomontade, Daly cites, and rewrites the post-apostolic father, Gregory of Nazianzus, in defence of her proposition that a male Christ cannot effect the salvation of women, precisely because of his gender:
Frye notes, however, that the slogan "runs contrary to the evidence. Neither the bible nor the Christian and Jewish traditions have ever taught that God is male, and, in terms both explicit and implicit have repeatedly denied that he is. In this, both the Christian and Jewish traditions stand in stark opposition to pagan and gnostic religions which recognized a host of 'genital gods', or dii genitales, as Cicero's Roman contemporaries called them." He points out that "the most dramatic refutation" of any identification of God as a male is found in Deuteronomy 4:16-17: "Therefore take good heed to yourselves. Since you saw no form on the day that the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a graven image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female..." God's fatherhood "does not consist in sexual generation," Fry observes, "but in his calling of them to be his chosen people, and his adoption of them by his grace."
What has not been assumed has not been healed; it is what is united to his divinity that is saved ...' (Epistle 101)
Her challenge to classical Christology woefully
begs the question of the equally limited efficacy of the
salvific remit of any female saviour, putative or
otherwise, given that sexual dimorphism is routinely and
necessarily attendant upon birth, and as such, precludes
any doctrine of incarnational theism tout court effected by a
single individual. Even if we consider anomalous cases of
intersex, the ruthless logic of Daly's reading of the
axiom still functions as a two edged sword, both for and
against any concept of an androgynous human person to
realize the redemption of the human race in toto,
just as it does for male or female humans. (I exempt from
consideration for the moment at least, the sub-human
realm, to which this proscription applies with even more
drastic results.) Presumably, androgynous saviours can
only save androgynous humans, accepting the premise
by means of which Daly's interpretative twist stands
Gregory's dictum on its head. Notwithstanding this,
androgynous Christologies, as distinct from an androgynous
saviour, are not only an intellectual possibility, but an
article of faith for some believers. (See R. R.
Reuther, Christology And
Feminism: Can A Male Saviour Save Women?) Thus
the nihilistic bravura of Daly's willful misinterpretation
becomes strangely reminiscent of the Buddhist catuskoti,
or Nagarjuna's tetralemma: the saviour cannot be male; nor
female; nor both (androgynous); nor neither. Here
endeth the lesson.
This failed soteriology of early, radical,
feminist theology has the merit of provoking thought. I
argue the case for the specific maleness of the Christian
incarnate Word as intrinsic to its specific form of
theistic belief and as the theology of identity is a
marker of transcendence and theism in general. This
argument will rely upon the Christological epistemology
essential to the P creation narrative in conjunction with
the analogous rapport sustained by its Sabbath rubric and
the narrative of the institution of the Lord's Supper in
particular, incorporating special reference to the title
'Son of man' in both the first and second testaments. I
will also give heed to the two Christologies of the
messianic series, the first and last miracle stories of
that catena: The
Transformation Of Water Into Wine and The
Transfiguration. Both
narratives deploy the title 'Son of man'; now in the
context of Eros,
and now in that of Thanatos.
The former is clearly related to the Eucharist, and the
latter to baptism, and to The Apocalypse as a whole, so I
contend. Both narratives sort with the concept of the
symbolic masculine, as the formal subject of the Day 3
rubric of the creation story, as well as with the motif of
purification prevalent throughout The Apocalypse, vital to
its concept of sanctification and to Pneumatology in
general.
The vision of the woman is therefore central to these
arguments, even if astonishingly to the sensibilities of
certain, polemical, feminist theologies. As The Holy Spirit she is instrumental
to the resurrection of the body, and was instrumental to
the same in the eschatological age antecedent to the
incarnation of The Word, The Son. That is to say, she stands for the
principle of samsaric eschatology. She is
the foil to the persona Eve of the J narrative, and so the
exponent of the role of the feminine principle not only in
sanctification as regards the body, that is, the mind :
body, or soma.
I have already mentioned the Day 4 rubric in its relation
to that of Day 1. That the epistemological-Christological
purpose of the P narrative, is thus clearly evoked in this
same vision, with especial reference to the conceptual
forms mind : body and mind respectively, in combination
with the evocation of the proto-mythlogical narrative of
the J story, is assured. The cosmological tropes sun, moon
and stars are here just as patently significative of the
body, the body gendered, that is, sexually dimorphic, male and female, and
non-gendered respectively. The latter is remarkably
announced by the trope of the twelve stars. These three
figures, sun, moon and stars, are fundamental to the
measure of time, a fact which further corroborates the
connection of the vision of the woman with the P narrative
of the archaeological week of seven days. The clear
association the twelve stars have with both the sixth seal
in particular, and the series of seals as a whole, as with
the later reference to the 144,000 (Apocalypse 14.1-5),
must be accounted for in any hermeneutic of the vision and
its relation to eschatology in general.
That the woman depicted
is the mother of Jesus is not in question. But her persona
need not remain restricted to this alone. Most of the symbolism of The Apocalypse is
polysemous. So indeed, I conjecture that she
must figure relatively to the eschatological epoch to
which I have just referred; the first, which is
antecedent to the incarnation of The Word. The latter
denotes the second. This construal fits the heaven-earth
binary, restating the paradigm transcendence :
immanence. Her connection to samsaric eschatologies
and to the concept of the body is thus ensured. The
latter is guaranteed by the recurrence of the imagery of
the Day 4 rubric. So a yet further challenge awaits
feminist theology: namely the examination of, and
engagement with just those eschatologies I refer to as samsaric.
Two further examples of similarly failed
critiques of the presentation of gender in biblical
theology more generally, and of The Apocalypse in particular,
will suffice to introduce the next stage of the argument.
The first is Mary Grey's interpretation of the vision to
which I have been referring. Her hermeneutic to some
extent, squares with my own. Moreover, it engages the heaven : earth binary,
the closest of any scriptural equivalent to the
categoreal paradigm, transcendence : immanence. Grey
regards the symbol introduced in chapter 12 as 'an
epiphany of Sophia', (Grey, Mary, Wisdom
Of Fools?: Seeking Revelation For Today,
SPCK, London, 1993, p 141.) But she is unable to account
for the placement of the vision as central to the book
as a whole, and the cosmological symbolism. Her
assertion that 'Heaven and earth, good and evil are
depicted as in total opposition to each other.' (Ibid
p 142), makes no impact on the semantic of this
binary and its far-reaching intertextual ramifications.
This gormless cliché undermines her own and
otherwise justifiable claim regarding the woman that
'She is an epiphany of the connectedness of creation:
the desert receives her and is experienced by her as
a place of nourishment.' (loc cit., emphasis
original). It exposes the thrust of her approach as
barely more than ideological.
The scriptural
connectedness of The Apocalypse itself reflects the
theology of immanence, the theology of 'the
earthly', in juxtaposition to the theology of
transcendence. It stands as 'end' to 'beginning',
and the cause of the latter it accepts. It is
finally and fully, the vindication rather than the
condemnation, of the 'symbolic feminine', which is
the 'male and female' of the creation
rubric. True
to the intertextual as well as extratextual nature
of The Apocalypse, with which Grey like many of her
colleagues, deals in piecemeal fashion at best,
the stars, figured in number as twelve, are recursive to
the enumeration of the sealed tribes in the Christian
eschatology of the first numbered series, just as they
are precursive to the later mention of the 144,000, 'the
redeemed of the earth'. This cross-referencing
demonstrates the difficulties surrounding the book's
interpretation. Its opacity and hypertextual quality
make it arguably the most hermeneutically challenging
member of the canon. Her own remonstrations leave next to no impression
on the quest for its meaning. This is the best and
simplest advice I can offer to any aspiring hermeneut,
feminist or otherwise, wishing to broach the last book
of the bible: begin at the beginning, start with the
first.
Many commentators gloss this by resorting to the proscriptions of sexual gratification required of militia before battle in the Tanakh, as a precedent. That might be more apt to the previous vision, that of the same number constituting the twelve sealed tribes. But there is no battle involved here and certainly no military imagery which might justify the argument. The 144,000 ' ... sing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders.' (Apocalypse 14.3.) Should one then not expect of a work in which sanctification is a major thematic pre-occupation, some consideration of celibacy? Moreover, does this aim to provide an albeit Christian theology of religions not fit with ecclesiological element of the book, an aim begun in the sevenfold series of letters to the angels of the churches? In passing, it is necessary to note the total absence in Pippin's work of any corresponding derogation of the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ, common to two of the four gospels. Nor is there any satisfactory account of the compensatory trope of the eschatological, nuptial banquet in The Apocalypse, which features as part of its own dénouement, pursuant to the final series, the series of bowls.It is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are chaste; it is these who follow the Lamb wherever he goes; these have been redeemed from mankind as first fruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth no lie was found for they are spotless. (Apocalypse 14.4, 5.)
Now the earth was without shape and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the watery deep, but the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water. (Genesis 1.2, ESV; Mymh ynp lc tpxrm Myhl) xwrw Mwht ynp lc K#xw whbw wht htyh Cr)hw
LXX: h de gh hn aoratov kai akataskeuastov kai skotov epanw thv abussou kai pneuma qeou epefeto epanw tou udatov)
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