So what if we need a Christianity less certain, more mysterious, less concrete and more enfleshed? What if that amounts to a paradigm whose core is paradox?
We live at the intersection of another solid stable certain paradigm that is going all squishy. The quantum world is displacing our modern measureable-certain-cause and effect experience, and saying what you see is definitely not what you get….or more appropriately what you have “got.” Because what we have “got” is not something we can actually see of course, but more than that, what we see is not an accurate indicator of what is actually there.
The atomic world a’la Newton, only accessible to the microscope holder, was a world of tiny billard balls spinning and orbiting in predictable, elliptical and symmetrical paths. The pictures and plastic models in high school chemistry were “the way we were” to quote one of Barbara’s big hits. That WAS the paradigm AND reality.
Atoms were separate from other atoms. Electrons separate from protons and neutrons. Molecules here, totally separate and independent from molecules over there. The implications of all that orderly separate predictability was we lived in a world where what appeared to be space between atoms and molecules could easily be compared to the obvious space between you and me. Space, distance and time were not just realities they were concepts that helped us understand the world.
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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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So what if we need a Christianity less certain, more mysterious, less concrete and more enfleshed? What if that amounts to a paradigm whose core is paradox? 
The atomic world a’la Newton, only accessible to the microscope holder, was a world of tiny billard balls spinning and orbiting in predictable, elliptical and symmetrical paths. The pictures and plastic models in high school chemistry were “the way we were” to quote one of Barbara’s big hits. That WAS the paradigm AND reality. 
