Let’s say the author and editors of the Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy) were living in a largely mythic culture, with a mythic view of God as well as a mythic reality and world around them. We might legitimately ask the question, does a skin legion, per the book of Leviticus, actually render you unclean to attend “church?’ I mean literally, does that mean you can’t worship God and he no longer connects to you? Does contact with a corpse disqualify you from being able to worship? All the laws of Leviticus, for instance, come “from God” yes, but within a very particular sort of mythic culture, meaning they are coming from a very particular view of God that THEY had. Does inspiration make this view of God, and these laws “correct” because it is canonized in the inspired text?
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Authors are always enmeshed in a culture, it cannot be otherwise, and I think we have observed that the idea of an author penning an inspired text does not mute, overcome, or diminish there cultural-ness. Abraham and child sacrifice, Moses and ordered genocide, Paul and slavery…
Jean Gebser, writing early in the 20th century, noted that civilizations go through stages of development that represent actual ways of seeing and viewing the world. His observation was that humanity’s stage of consciousness and development was reflected in their meaning making as a culture. A magic/tribal culture will make sense of their world, with sun and rain god’s and the corresponding dances to invoke those god’s activity differently than a postmodern pluralistic culture makes sense of it’s multicultural, rationalistic way of explaining a drought. Gebser’s contribution is in noting that over the course of thousands of years cultures have undergone slow but marked evolutionary development.
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What are the implications for the biblical text’s author being enmeshed within a particular culture vastly different than that of the readers?
For instance in Genesis 22 God in the inspired text says to Abraham go offer your son as a burnt offering on Mount Moriah. We could bypass the question of culture and time period, as most readers of the biblical text do, including most conservative scholars, seminarians and professors. If we do that we are left asking a couple honest questions.
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Let’s lay aside the old question that leads us to the two bucket approach. And instead of asking what is cultural and irrelevant and what is eternal and applicable how about if we acknowledge the entire text is cultural and that none of it is written to an audience in 2010 and in spite of what we are often told, inspiration doesn’t not make it universally applicable. The last number of posts has demonstrated that problem. So what about this as a new possibility…
How does an inspired text exert or exercise a shaping influence on the life of the reader(s)? The key word is “how?” In the past it was through extracting what we thought were timeless truths from a time bound text, sort of trying to figure out the eternal kernel in the culture bound husk. But what if we admit the obvious, it is all cultural and it can’t be otherwise.
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Can we grow to the place we are comfortable with our knowledge limits and open to what others can teach us? Are we open to the idea we do not have all the answers and much of what we hold is simply wrong, we just aren’t sure which parts?
I am not sure we are. Taking this position would seem to fly in the face of the very system the church has engaged where mythos has collapsed into logos. Where the power of the story and narrative (mythos) is overshadowed by the rules, rationality and certainty (logos). Another word use for this by experts like Karen Armstrong is “fundamentalist system;” rules, doctrines and lifestyle statements to insure as much conformity and uniformity as possible. This is the essence of the socialized mind we have been discussing.
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Please click here for part 4
I think the best way for us to safeguard ourselves from the charge of this being too New Agey is to recognize that while we are called to be gods, our god-ness is always derivative and therefore diminutive. This is a critical distinction that prevents putting humanity on the same level as the Triune God but at the same time acknowledges and engages what appears to be the full intent of the biblical material. Whatever it means that we are made imago dei and have the breath of God within us, it is certainly does not mean we are in every way shape and form identical to the Triune God the Creator of the Universe. There is a distinction between Creator and the Created. There is a qualitative and unique difference between the Maker and the Made. As the Created and Made ones, whatever similarities, likenesses, and whatever imago dei fullness we have, is derived from the God who made us. As a result of being derived it means we are less than the Creator. This is the safeguard and clarification of how we can have the first person conversation while allowing the Triune God to remain God and yet at the same time we can be imago dei, little gods, as Jesus says.
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read part 1 first
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GOD IN US
In our Protestant church tradition we don’t have many categories for understanding this first person, God-within pursuit. But Scripture teaches this first person perspective. Consider these passages in light of this 1st person conversation. (Emphasis added.)
His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. (2 Peter 1:3-4)
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read part one first
THE REST OF THE STORY
The Fall-Redemption story is part of the story, but it is really an abbreviated lo-cal excerpt of the fuller version. And here is the problem; to start the conversation with the Fall is to start talking about God’s Story at Genesis 3. Starting the conversation here and omitting the opening salvos of the first two chapters has locked us into having only one conversation about God: the 2nd person conversation. I would like to suggest when we start the conversation with a fall-redemption paradigm we only can talk about God in 2nd person. In other words the only way we can view God is as “Other” as “out there” as another person. While that is totally true about God our inability to see God from a couple other perspectives may be debilitating us. [read more...]
I rarely see afternoon TV, but recently hit a twenty-minute segment and wow – was it compelling. Through sobbing and tears, person after person began recounting how after watching a TV show one month earlier their lives had instantly and forever changed. “Instantly” and “forever” definitely caught my attention. They went on to talk about how they were now in charge of their lives, bringing to themselves any outcomes they chose. The teachers of the phenomenon made it clear it was all because “you create your own reality, and that as a spiritual being you bring your spirit to bear on the circumstances of life.” I paused long enough to take in the details because of the confessed monumental change it brought. This was my introduction to The Secret, the most recent craze to hit American culture and propelled to cult status by current spiritual and philanthropy diva, Oprah.
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