Class Day 2 – Athanasius and Gregory: God Is Not a Monster

My wife has subscribed to Facebook updates from Nancy Leigh DeMoss, and while most of them are perfectly fine, every so often DeMoss posts something like this:

Did you notice who killed the firstborns? The Lord (Ex. 12:29). And years later, God Himself put to death His own beloved Son so we might be set free from slavery.

Back away slowly.

It’s worth remembering that even as the early church fathers explicitly focused on the notion of theoprepes, what is fitting for the divine, we do this, too. Everyone puts God in a box. Can God sin? If your answer is no, then you have decided it is not fitting for God to sin. Can we describe God with feminine pronouns? If your answer is no, again you have used theoprepes. 

For Origen and his successors, theoprepes was important because it was a significant criticism from the Greek pagans, who largely agreed with Plato’s conception that the soul had sinned and fallen into the body. Therefore, the body was something like a contaminant, and unfitting to house God. The incarnation thus was a major stumbling block, and the early fathers needed to explain why theoprepes  allowed for God to take on flesh.

Athanasius of Alexandria followed Origen in this vein with his work On the Incarnation of the Word. In answering the question of the fittingness of the incarnation, he argued it was not only for the liberation of humanity from sin and death, but to restore humanity its dignity. Further, it was not the annulment of creation, but its culmination. The world was renewed by the same Word who created it.

Class, Day 1 – Origen: Your God Is Absurd

Following is a summary of a lecture given yesterday by my professor in Patristic and Medieval Theology.

To understand Origen of Alexandria – or Gregory of Nyssa or almost any other Greek-speaking early church father – you have to understand the concept of theoprepes. Plato introduced the concept of theoprepes when he went after Homer’s depictions of the gods. Because the gods/god are/is the ultimate Good, Plato has a big problem with the way Homer makes them act, but because Homer’s poetry is foundational for Greek culture, Plato can’t just dismiss it outright.

So he metaphorizes it. He maintains the truth of the moral lessons but rejects the historicity of the depiction, which he considered blasphemous because the gods did not act in a fitting manner. And that is theoprepes, the concept of what is fitting for the divine.

Origen is faced with a similar dilemma.

He believes in the inspiration of Scripture, which for him writing about 200 C.E. is still just the Old Testament, but he recoils at the anthropomorphism of God found there. And with good reason, from his perspective. When Celsus writes the criticism of Christianity to which Origen responds in Against Celsus, one of his prime concerns is the anthropomorphism of God – it’s just not fitting, in Greek thought, for God to act this way, and a literal reading of Scripture was a huge stumbling block to those educated Greeks to whom Origen was reaching out.

Not only that, he finds numerous places where the text contradicts itself or describes absurdities. So he argues for a metaphorical-allegorical reading of those pieces of scripture where theopedes is violated.

God to Job: Humans Are So Overrated

When it comes to humanity’s place in creation, we have our scripture down pat: Genesis 1:27-28.

God created humanity in God’s own image,
in the divine image God created them,
male and female God created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it. Take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and everything crawling on the ground.”

“Master” the earth, “take charge” of its animals. Or, in the famous words of more traditional translations: We have “dominion” over this world. Throw in Psalm 8 for good measure:

You’ve made [humanity] only slightly less than divine,
crowning them with glory and grandeur.
You’ve let them rule over your handiwork,
putting everything under their feet—
all sheep and all cattle,
the wild animals too,
the birds in the sky,
the fish of the ocean,
everything that travels the pathways of the sea.

Cut and dried, right?

Not so fast.

Jed Bartlet’s Job Moment

One of the themes on this blog lately has been the propriety – or not – of railing against God in times of distress. I tend to (surprise!) take a liberal view on this topic, that God not only can handle our complaints and frustrations but wants us to bring them to him. He made us to be emotional beings, and stifling our emotions is neither healthy nor productive.

Many Christians disagree, and I confess it’s difficult to listen when someone truly “goes off” on God – as happens in the Season 2 finale of The West Wing, which my wife and I are working through on Netflix.

Below the jump, I’ll post the speech in its entirety; most Christians, I suspect, will wince multiple times. You might even be offended. But the question we need to ask is this: Are we offended because God is, or are we offended because we have been taught to be?

[This paragraph contains spoilers] The speech occurs in the National Cathedral, after a funeral for President Jeb Bartlet’s longtime assistant, Mrs. Landingham, who had died in a car wreck. The death occurred after a string of crises and tragedies – including an assassination attempt that nearly killed his deputy chief of staff, Josh Lyman – that, let’s be honest, serve to make the show interesting, but would lead a normal person to consider whether she had been singled out to play Job in some sort of modern-day heavenly remake. [End spoilers]

Bartlett asks the Secret Service to close the cathedral so he can spend some time alone, and after some unnecessarily loud and echoey door slamming to let us know the cathedral has been closed, Bartlett begins walking up the aisle toward the vestibule.

When God Abuses

Does the Old Testament portray God as abusive?

In our Old Testament Theology class, we must give two presentations about the topics covered over a given week’s reading in our textbook, Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony. Dispute. Advocacy. My first presentation was on the topic of Yahweh as hidden, abusive and inconsistent. The next week’s assignment was covering the topic of Yahweh as unresponsive, unreliable and unjust.

These are Brueggemann’s categories, and they end up being pretty redundant. The same verses used for describing Yahweh has hidden are equally applicable for describing him as unresponsive, and vice versa. Further, his hiddenness and unresponsiveness clearly make him unreliable, as does his inconsistency. In which case, Brueggemann could have saved a lot of space and simply focused on Yahweh as abusive, unreliable and unjust. But to the extent Yahweh is unreliable and unjust, doesn’t this also make him abusive?

I’d argue yes. In fact, I’d argue the primary counter-testimony of Israel in the Old Testament, whether the authors intended this or not, is that Yahweh is abusive. Abuse is God’s defining action in the texts that push back against the central portrayal of God as loving, just, merciful parent and partner.

There are a number of reasons why I argue this.

Every Day Is Saturday

A friend of mine has been going through some tough times, and as he was telling me about them, he mentioned being angry at God, then being embarrassed for being angry at God. Embarrassment strikes me as wholly unnecessary – but a natural and understandable outgrowth of our American culture, which moralizes success and makes failure in any sense a matter of character rather than circumstance or dumb luck.

It so happened that I had finished reading the counter-testimony section in Theology of the Old Testament where Walter Brueggemann discusses the counter-testimony of Israel. And much of what Brueggemann had to say about the difficult passages that make up that counter-testimony seemed appropriate for my friend’s feelings – and I suspect the feelings of many of this blog’s readers, who seem to be questioning, doubting types. So here’s what I said, and I hope it blesses you today:

The Toxic Assumption of the ‘Biblical Worldview’

I’m working my way through unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity … and Why It Matters, the groundbreaking book from David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons of the Barna Group. It’s taking a little longer than I expected because, surprise!, it’s tough to get through a book based primarily on survey results and data.

It’s also a tough read because I find myself disagreeing with it more than I thought I would. The data is the data, of course, but the conclusions Kinnaman and Lyons reach seem a little off to me. It reminds me of hearing Republican Party leaders talk about how they need to change their “message” and “tone” after getting shellacked in the 2012 elections without seeming to understand that voters have decisively rejected their policies.

Likewise, Kinnaman and Lyons have compelling evidence that traditional theology and practice have failed yet seem to argue that what traditional evangelical Christianity needs is a different message and tone. It seems they can’t quite face the fact that their own data calls into question their own doctrines.

A key example of this is their presentation of the results when they asked if a respondent has a “biblical worldview.” Here’s how Kinnaman sets it up:

Of course, this [fact that the about 70 percent of Americans claim to have made a personal decision to follow Christ] raises the question of the depth of their faith. If that many Americans have made decisions to follow Jesus, our culture and our world would be revolutionized if they simply lived that faith. It is easy to embrace a costless form of Christianity in America today, and we have probably contributed to that by giving people a superficial understanding of the gospel and focusing only on their decision to convert.

I have no problems with this paragraph at all. But note that he’s talking about needing a deeper “understanding of the gospel,” which is interesting, given what comes next:

At Barna we employ dozens of tools to assess the depth of a person’s faith. Let me suggest one for our discussion: a biblical worldview. A person with a biblical worldview experiences, interprets and responds to reality in light of the Bible’s principles. What Scripture teaches is the primary grid for making decisions and interacting with the world. (75)

What happened here? In traditional evangelicalism, “biblical worldview” is something of a code for “conservative doctrine” that treats the Bible as a fully applicable roadmap for life in the 21st century, notwithstanding its final authorship no later than the 2nd century. By linking “deeper understanding of the gospel” and “biblical worldview,” Kinnaman has forced together two different arguments. Certainly a deep understanding of the gospel requires reliance on the Bible; no one disputes that, I hope. But Kinnaman is implying a deep understanding of the gospel requires reliance on a specific method of reading and applying what the Bible says, which is problematic. I would argue it’s one of the reasons why Kinnaman’s own data show young people  abandoning the church.

Why Your Great-Grandchildren Are (Probably) Safe from God’s Wrath

“The Lord! The Lord!   a God who is compassionate and merciful,
very patient,
full of great loyalty and faithfulness,
showing great loyalty to a thousand generations,
forgiving every kind of sin and rebellion,
yet by no means clearing the guilty,
punishing for their parents’ sins
their children and their grandchildren,
as well as the third and the fourth generation.

— Exodus 34:6-7

Walter Brueggemann contends this is an ancient credo, the earliest formulation of a particular attempt by Israel to outline the properties of Yahweh. It occurs within a perilous context, right after the story of the golden calf, when Moses argues with Yahweh, trying to convince him not to destroy Israel for its idolatry at the base of Mount Sinai. This passage in particular comes during the sequence in which Moses asks Yahweh to reveal himself to him, and Moses must hide in a rock while Yahweh passes by and shows him his back.

There’s an uncomfortable tension in this passage, isn’t there? On the one hand, Yahweh is “slow to anger” – Brueggemann says this phrase literally is entertainingly translated “has long nostrils” that apparently allow plenty of time for the anger to subside before it comes snorting out – and full of forgiveness. On the other, he is somewhat vengeful, “visiting the iniquity of the parents” on as many as four generations of innocent children.

We had some lengthy conversations about this in class yesterday, and it’s striking how much we westerners want to reconcile this apparent contradiction. My classmates wanted to water down the meaning of “vengeance” or argue that what appear to be contradictions are actually the result of changing contexts or argue that love requires, not precludes, discipline. Certainly these last two points are true; I don’t know anyone who argues otherwise. But I don’t see them as applicable here. The context is the same, as these are two halves of the same credo, and lovingly disciplining a person for an offense is different than disciplining his great-grandchildren for it.

Now these two halves are not placed in equal balance against each other. Yahweh’s love endures 1,000 generations, his vengeance only four. That’s important to understand. Even so, it’s difficult if not impossible to reconcile “merciful and gracious” with “visiting the iniquity upon the children.”

I’d argue Israel recognized this, too. Which is why the second half of this phrase is almost immediately jettisoned from the rest of the nation’s testimony about Yahweh as presented in the Old Testament.

Not a Tame Lion – but a Good One

When looking at the question of God’s sovereignty vs. what we understand to be good and loving, we could do worse than looking to C.S. Lewis, who addressed the question briefly in The Last Battle, the final book in his Chronicles of Narnia series.

The argument advanced by the neo-Calvinist wing of the evangelical movement is that God being sovereign can act how he wants, and that those actions by default, regardless of how they are perceived by us mere mortals, are good and loving.

My response – and that of Rachel Held Evans and others – is that such an argument allows the subversion and redefinition of the very concepts of love and goodness. If God cannot be trusted to act in a way that comports to commonly understood definitions of love an goodness, those terms have no meaning. That doesn’t mean we should always be able to understand what God is doing, and I don’t doubt we may somehow misinterpret actions that really are loving and good if we knew the whole picture as God does. But it does mean we can and should question portrayals of God, in the Bible and elsewhere, that turn him into a genocidal monster or a bloodthirsty maniac or a capricious wielder of natural disasters.

In The Last Battle, the crafty ape Shift has coerced the confused donkey Puzzle into wearing an old lion’s skin and telling the other animals the donkey is really Aslan, Narnia’s creator and the Christ figure of the series. Shift then sells the animals into slavery to Narnia’s old archenemy Calormen, forcing the free talking animals to work for Calormene soldiers as they cut down the talking trees and float them downriver to the sea for trade.

When Narnian King Tirian and his old friend, a unicorn named Jewel, stumble upon two Calormene soldiers mistreating a talking horse, they lose their cool and kill the soldiers. After fleeing, they reassess the situation:

The Time Jeremiah Accused God of Raping Him

There’s been some discussion ever since my post about the Christian rock group P.O.D.’s use of the f-word in a song about appropriate means of addressing God. I’ve argued that God does not want nor expect us to hold back from letting him see the full range of our emotion in a time of crisis or tragedy, and if that range includes full-throated anger, so be it. Others, tending to emphasize God’s holiness, believe that there is a baseline of reverence that should be kept in place, no matter what.

But those folks need to deal with Jeremiah’s striking broadside against Yahweh in Jeremiah 20. The problem is most of our translators are wary to describe exactly what the prophet is accusing God of doing when he laments ever having accepted Yahweh’s call. The key verse is v.7. Here it is from an array of common translations (I’ve grouped ones that translate the bolded words the same:

Wycliffe:

⁷ (O) Lord, thou deceivedest me, and I am deceived; thou were stronger than I, and thou haddest the mastery; I am made into scorn all day. All men bemock me,

Geneva, KJV, RSV, ESV:

⁷ O Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived; thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed: I am in derision daily, every one mocketh me.

⁸ For since I spake, I cried out, I cried violence and spoil; because the word of the Lordwas made a reproach unto me, and a derision, daily.

NASB:

⁷ O Lord, You have deceived me and I was deceived;
You have overcome me and prevailed.
I have become a laughingstock all day long;
Everyone mocks me.

NIV ’84/TNIV/NIV ’11:

⁷ O Lord, you deceived me, and I was deceived (footnotes include “persuaded” in both cases);
you overpowered me and prevailed.
I am ridiculed all day long;
everyone mocks me.

NLT:

⁷ O Lord, you misled me,
and I allowed myself to be misled.
You are stronger than I am,
and you overpowered me.
Now I am mocked every day;
everyone laughs at me.

CEV:

⁷ You tricked me, Lord,
and I was really fooled.
You are stronger than I am,
and you have defeated me.
People never stop sneering
and insulting me.

The Message:

⁷ You pushed me into this, God, and I let you do it.
You were too much for me.
And now I’m a public joke.
They all poke fun at me.

CEB:

⁷ Lord, you enticed me, and I was taken in.
You were too strong for me, and you prevailed.
Now I’m laughed at all the time;
everyone mocks me.

I think you get the idea. Kudos to the older translations. In this case, the KJV/RSV family use the stronger word, “deceived,” while more modern translators seem uncomfortable with the notion that God could deceive someone and so change it a little – the NIV adds a more anodyne verb in the footnotes, and the New Living Translation and the Message even seem to blame Jeremiah, although that sense is not at all in the original, which simply repeats the same verb.

But that verb has a context that goes even beyond “deceived.”

This was first pointed out by Abraham J. Heschel, in his 1962 book The Prophets. The verb patah is found elsewhere in the Old Testament. For example:

When a man seduces a young woman who isn’t engaged to be married yet and he sleeps with her, he must marry her and pay the bride-price for her. (Exodus 22:16)

The rulers of the Philistines confronted her and said to her, “Seduce him and find out what gives him such great strength and what we can do to overpower him, so that we can tie him up and make him weak. Then we’ll each pay you eleven hundred pieces of silver.” (Judges 16:5)

If my heart has been drawn to a woman
and I have lurked at my neighbor’s door, (Job 31:9)

Therefore, I will charm her,
and bring her into the desert,
and speak tenderly to her heart. (Hosea 2:16)

while she’s a virgin,
that she not be seduced
and become pregnant
while still living at home;
when she’s married,
that she not go straying;
or having married,
that she not be infertile. (Sirach 42:10)

The typical context of patah is sexual, which makes the rest of the verse far darker:

Lord, you seduced me, and I was seduced.
You were too strong for me, and you prevailed.

The image of overpowering that follows seduction is less rhetorical and more physical. The image seems to be far closer to rape than any mere contest of wills. Indeed, this is exactly what Heschel argues, noting the second verb, hazak, usually translated “stronger” in Jeremiah 20:7, is also used elsewhere in a sexual context:

But if the man met up with the engaged woman in a field, grabbing her and having sex with her there, only the man will die. (Deuteronomy 22:25)

So the Levite grabbed his secondary wife and sent her outside to them. They raped her and abused her all night long until morning. They finally let her go as dawn was breaking. (Judges 19:25)

When she served him the food, he grabbed her and said, “Come have sex with me, my sister.”

So Heschel argues, “The words used by Jeremiah to describe the impact of God upon his life are identical with the terms for seduction and rape in the legal terminology of the Bible. (113)”

The overall impression is one of shame and embarrassment, especially given the mockery Jeremiah subsequently describes. Walter Baumgartner in Jeremiah’s Poems of Lament says the seduction language is only “a weak allusion” but when combined with the stronger language of the subsequent line, which he says is taken from wrestling, it is clear the prophet has “half willingly, half under coercion, placed himself in Yahweh’s service. … But now, like a girl stranded in shame, … he reaps nothing but scorn and derision” (74).

Needless to say, Heschel’s argument, while adopted by some, has also been opposed by others.