The Dual Relinquishing

I gather that I have tended to dwell on revisiting one of my central theses, thus (from my last post):

"For the purposes of anything we might understand, are lives are shot through with things that are effectively random or acausal.  For us, this ought not to be surprising, since each of us has the internalized experience of things within us arising we-know-not-where.  What not to be also surprising is the fact that the logic of the Gospels is not merely that we are observers of our surroundings, but also that we are observers of those 'selves' to which we habitually lay claim, yet which we do not truly possess."

We have no right or reason to claim possession of ourselves (this much the preachers will assert), but it avails us nothing to claim alternatively that ourselves--perhaps best phrased as our "souls" or our "lives"--are the true possessions of our Maker, while yet we claim that the loci of our conceptualities reside undoubtedly at the center of our very "selves."  In truth, we look upon ourselves from afar, and from varying viewpoints, and it is no true alternative to claiming possession of ourselves, if we refuse to admit that we cannot with authority claim experience of our definitive selves.  (Here in the analysis we fall most usually into conflict with the preachers, who want us to collapse into shame--for which they stand ready to provide remedy--though the very self-critical and self-condemning "self" that we each are expected to offer up to the denominations is our own creation--a conceited homunculus that is its own masochistic creator and lordling.)  

Each of us is a cloud of variable coalescences--a more-or-less cohesive skein of impressions from which arises a sense of self, a critical mass of sensations and processings-of-sensations that we enthrone as the "I" that is the player in the playing-out of our life's narrative.  The God who knows us better than we know ourselves resides more centrally in our "selves" than we do, and the giving-up of ourselves to God consists originally in our relinquishing of the conceit that we ever possessed ourselves, or even knew that "self" that always eluded us.

Jesus asked what a man might give in exchange for his soul.  Jesus asked what a man might give in exchange for his life.  How Jesus might have asked such a double question in Aramaic we will probably never know, but of course we have only the Jesus of the Gospels, not really the Jesus of whom the Gospels wrote.  In the Greek of the Gospels the word for "soul" and the word for "life" (in the "exchange" question just preceding) are one and the same.  And indeed this is all the same to us, for in the giving-up (that is, in the acceptance that one had never true possession), the relinquishing of one's soul and the relinquishing of one's life are one and the same.

Random or Acausal

One of the episodes of the Bible that has been deprived largely of theatrical or film depiction (at least in mainstream Western culture) is the Ezra-Nehemiah cycle.  Certainly Ezra-Nehemiah suffers from no overall lack of iconic events or imagery.  The arrival of the titular character from the bustle of exotic Persia, the precarious situation of the resident Jews, the scheming of surrounding elements, the frantic erection of the city walls, the pitiful cries of the Jewish crowd for mercy and instruction from their God--each of these is suitable for evocative depiction (and each of these, in artful maneuverings, is incorporated into art and preaching intended for the faithful.)

Much more difficult would it be to film an evocative depiction of the Ezra-Nehemiah cycle as a whole.  How does one portray the actual human drama of a people sundering its marriage ties--ties scandalously prevalent, if the text is to be believed--without arousing an (unbiblical) sympathy for the affected families?  Leaving aside the darker implications of the fixation on sundering male-Jew to female-non-Jew marriages--effectively permitting to Jewish warriors the same power-rape privilege (and disinheritance of mixed offspring) over conquered or captured peoples as was common in those days--there is also the cinematic challenge of showing the events with real actors.

The Ezra-Nehemiah scenes of warrior-citizens building walls with their weapons at the ready (and hostile elements crouching in the surrounding shadows) would make for great film footage.  Can the same be said of pious Jewish men casting their powerless wives and effectively orphaned children to the mercies of ancient, strife-torn precincts?  In regards such as these--humanly-unrecognizable scenarios of sanitized purported actualization of religious ideas--is the veracity of biblical accounts most in question, not in, say, archeologists scratching around to find evidences by which to "prove" the Bible.

It is small wonder, then, that the Book of Ruth--defying notions of racial or ethnic exclusion and making, thereby, Ruth's descendant David a questionable candidate for the kingship--is taken often to be a rebuttal of Ezra's and Nehemiah's parochialism.  Certainly a sense of humanity resides in Ruth that cannot be extracted so easily from the Ezra-Nehemiah crowds, beseeching mercy for their crime of miscegenation and begging for instruction on how to perpetrate the crime of abandoning their families.

What would be missing most acutely from a film depiction of that abandonment would be mixed couples agonized by the course of events--for surely simple humanity as a general phenomenon would include such scenarios.  Instead we are presented with the notion of the entirety of the resident Jewish population swept up in the pious hysteria--and the effectual unanimity thus depicted is required for the narrative to have its force.  This requirement of unanimity (or one might say of general hysteria) renders suspect the biblical text itself, and most revealingly it flies in the face of the preachers' contention that the Bible and the Bible alone shows humanity as we really are.

Of course general, stylized descriptions abound in literature.  Surely echoes of all of the people shouting in unison in Ezra's day can be found in the Gospels' descriptions of all of Jerusalem doing this or that.  The important distinction, however, lies in the lack of necessity applicable to any Gospel notion that "all of Jerusalem" did thus-and-such--no one has ever really believed (what with gates and prisons to guard, and businesses and slave-tasks to pursue) that "all of Jerusalem" would be taken literally at any juncture.  More importantly, such unanimity is not required, either by the theology being promulgated or by the ripe sources in the narratives for depiction in various media.

The Gospel narratives (excluding any sophomoric framing stories) rely on depictions of real humanity.  Things arise in the story of humanity that defy attribution to assignable cause, and the fact that the Gospels will embrace such variegation is a testimony to their genuineness.  The story of Judas inspired by greed is wedged palpably into the gospel story (to say nothing of the Acts' "account" of the presumably greedy Judas coveting a handful of coins so as to indulge himself in a nifty set-up for suicide.)  On the other hand, inspiration by the devil and consignment to remorseful suicide do not describe what people do "because" of some narratable impetus, but rather are things that people do because they are people.  This is the language and logic of the substance of the Gospels.

For the purposes of anything we might understand, are lives are shot through with things that are effectively random or acausal.  For us, this ought not to be surprising, since each of us has the internalized experience of things within us arising we-know-not-where.  What not to be also surprising is the fact that the logic of the Gospels is not merely that we are observers of our surroundings, but also that we are observers of those "selves" to which we habitually lay claim, yet which we do not truly possess.

We Are No Things

In my last post I wrote:

"What is integral about us is the truth--ascertainable by God alone--of the conjunction-result of the factors that frame us.  If it be said therefore--and I am not equipped to contest it--that indeed we have such 'center' as this divinely-ascertainable truth about us, then I will answer only that the very humility and piety of which I made mention above compels us to realize that this 'center' of ourselves in known only to God.

"What can be known only to God does not exist in any substance for us--and this admonition exists for us in greatest potency about the matter of us thinking we know ourselves.  We can imagine we know how the parts of ourselves interact with our world, and we can imagine--though with far less potency--how the parts of ourselves war with each other--but the notion that we know ourselves in our very centers is ridiculous.  As ridiculous as the notion that we can understand ourselves as distinct from our Creator."

The difficulty we have in understanding how we can exist as distinct from our Creator is foreshadowed in every foible we display in the fleeting and fragile use we make of our attentions.  For example, the Scriptures--fascinatingly--assign at different junctures sardonic attitudes both to God and to his nemesis Satan.  Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the Book of Job, and much of the book has to do with God and Satan, directly or indirectly, contriving affirmation of less-than-noble aspects of humanity.

What is not usually noticed is the fact that the entire Book of Job is overlain with a canopy of derisive satire involving the limitations of human attentions.  A huge work in the precious and sparse provision of expensive ancient writing media, the Book of Job deals exhaustively with how proper piety is to be displayed in relation to the weighty matter of God dispensing calamities on people--this exhaustive examination playing out after God has permitted the slaughter of many people in order to test the rectitude of one man.  One can imagine any of Job's extinguished sons or daughters issuing the ancient equivalent of "Seriously?"

An inescapable element of thought capacity is the fact that the alteration of a single initial premise can collapse a castle of contentions.  Of course, the logic behind the attentions paid to Job--and the expected rejoinder to my sarcastic "Seriously?" jibe above--is the presumed identification of Job (and any other biblical or Bible-based patriarch) with a people as a whole.  One might be reminded of Miriam's gleeful observation that Pharoah's horses and riders were cast into the sea.  Additionally, one might conjecture that the effectual subjugation of the armies of Egypt (and the terror struck upon the surrounding nations to the delight of Miriam) could have been achieved simply by the miraculous picking up of Pharoah alone to be cast into the sea.

This theme of corporate fortune carries on into the New Testament, as in the Gospel of Luke, the earliest chapters of which have Mary, the earthly mother of the Savior of the whole world, praising God for the blessing he has given to Abraham and his people.  Then the Baptist comes along--initiating that part of Luke that is not obvious tacked-on balderdash--to confront the contemporary patriarchs of "Abraham's people" with the fact that God might create children for Abraham from mere stones.  The corporate quality of much of religion--so starkly at odds with the "image of God" characterization of individuals--finds its comeuppance in the teachings of the Gospels in unsurpassed potency.

What is really important to understand is the fact that human thought-capability is rendered closest to most effective when it is applied to the sequential (and exhausting) flipping-back-and-forth between conceptualities that are simultaneously indispensable and irreconcilable.  The above descriptions I have presented of problematic individual-versus-corporate conceptualities illustrate one of the most basic of such themes in the Bible.  The question of the individual versus humanity-as-a-whole goes all the way back--all the way to Genesis and the preachers' endlessly-described Establishment of the Institution of Marriage.

Adam and Eve become "one flesh"--and they commit then that particular fleshly sin that garners so much attention as the precipitation of The Fall.  Adam is asked by God if he ate of the forbidden fruit, and Adam answers neither that "we" did, nor that he himself (as the head of the one-flesh body) committed the transgression.  No, Adam blames "the woman."  So much for the very first manifestation of corporate humanity.  It just gets worse from there.

I will not rehearse here my contentions that humanity was sinful from the first and that marriage--far from being God's plan--was God's concession to merely the latest of Adam's demands for companionship and support from things other than God.  (It is probably easiest in these regards to remember simply that relying purely upon God, and that distancing oneself from family and marriage, were the advices presented by Jesus.)  What is important to consider here is how, going back to the very first moments of our species' existence, humanity has been faced with what I referred to above--"sequential (and exhausting) flipping-back-and-forth between conceptualities that are simultaneously indispensable and irreconcilable.

The corporate existence of humanity, in contradistinction to the existence of the individual--basic though this conundrum might seem--is not actually the most basic of these exhausting exercises.  Adam came to be, and in that moment, presumably, there was in his consciousness only that consciousness itself and the panorama of surrounding existence.  That God was distinct from other elements of Adam's surroundings was, again presumably, Adam's first discovery.  My conjectures about humanity's first moments might be incorrect (as well as ahistorical or awkwardly oriented toward evolutionary "awakening"), but conjecture is all anyone has.

What is important to me is the fact that my conjecture seems to me the most solid connection to be achieved between raw logic and the actual texts of Genesis and the Gospels.  Adam, as he is put through the exercise of experiencing time, requires more and more actualization of himself in regard to his surroundings, and manifests less and less connection between himself and his Creator.  Adam starts off requiring an outlet of a burgeoning design capacity in his scarcely-describable-as-work "tending" of the Garden, and God observes that Adam--in presumably enviable proximity to his Creator--is nonetheless "alone."  It just gets worse from there, and as he disappears from Genesis, Adam is a procreator of more and more sin-doers and an ancestor of a humanity that loses all capacity to commune with God.

Looking at Creation, Adam fails to look enough also at his Creator.  Adam fails to exhaust himself properly in considering his status of being simultaneously a direct communicant with God and also a sharer with God of that third element--the surrounding Creation.  This is the primordial failing, and it is not merely pre-Fall, but proto-sinful.  Sin arises from the first, and it arises not because we do not behave properly in the world, but rather because we do not retain--we cannot retain--a perfect understanding of ourselves as relating directly to God and indirectly--through Creation--to God.

Our religions rely greatly on metaphors found in Creation to illustrate our relationship to God, but our growing understanding of nature as quantum-and-probability (foreshadowed by ancient musings about things like a ship replaced every part by every part being still the same ship) gives us to understand that the very substrate of commonsense reality relies on conceits about "things" that are merely provisional.  God is not a "thing," and when we try to understand our relationship to God, we must remember that we also are not "things" (or "persons".)  "We" are each individually experience-centers of direct intuition of God, and "we" are also each individually experience-centers of life in God's Creation under God.

We fly back and forth between these two "centers," and we have therefore no statutory "center."  We are "rocks" at one moment, and "Satans" at another.  We are children of Abraham or Moses or Adam at one moment, and children of the devil at another.  We are, in the conceptuality provided by the Gospels, children of Jesus, and (seeking not to deprive our Savior of the right to inhabit other religions' conceptualities) we make Jesus the pivot not merely of righteousness or of piety, but existence itself.

Jesus is the reality that stands between the God whom we cannot understand, and the self whom we cannot understand.  As this blog's present description states, God has no edge and we have no center.

The Notion that We Know Ourselves

Years ago I lit on the notion that I had answered satisfactorily the contention that it is incorrect to speak of the human person as "a part of God."  While it might seem humble and pious to assert that we are separate from God (as is "the painting from the painter," as I believe the rejoinder goes), this self-effacing contention does not address the necessary context within which this humility and piety must be actualized.

If we are viewed as being separate from a limitless God, then we have arrogated to ourselves a spot on some separate-from-God plane, a spot in which we can carry on endlessly about how small and insignificant we are.  The fact is that this plane--on which we are measured unaccountably against some concocted standard of teeny-weeny smallness--is itself a concoction, a fact that renders the "separate from God" conceptualization a manifest concoction also.

If we are small and God is big, then this smallness is infinite and this bigness is infinite.  No dimension being attached to us (as we are swallowed up into an infinitude), we are deprived of any intellectual actualization of this supposed separation between us and God.  We have no independent existence of our own, and we have no basis on which to ground our perceptions of the "I" or "you" or "we" that we entertain with such ease.

The "ease" with which we frame our individual existences is the--lively, or one might say "volatile"--gift of God, who grants us breaths and heartbeats and moments and quantum phenomena (and possibly a fantastic hierarchy--or one might say "dependency"--of progressively smaller and more fleeting time-and-space events.)  The whole notion that it is a requirement of piety to adopt a "humble" self-perception of ourselves as wretched, alienated, separated creations of God is a notion that collects to its objects without warrant a self-identification as loci of the Creation-essence, when properly the phenomenon of Creation is of the essence of God--presented to us in John as the Creation-mediation of Jesus.

We might as well be called "part of God" as anything else--as though such assertions really mattered--but what really, really matters--if we are to engage in such musings--is the way in which it is inescapable that the "part of God" conceptualization itself dissolves in the intellectual cauldron of its birth.  This is what I have realized in my latter years.  It is really insipid to contend this or that about the way in which we exist, when "existence" itself--insofar as we recognize "self-ness" as the hallmark of our existence--has not the substance with which we tend to imbue it.

This is what I mean by the present blog's description, in part, that "we have no center."  We have, in fact, no "parts" at all--we ourselves are fleeting, momentarily space-distorting phenomena that exist as the inexplicable (to us) conjunctions of (to us) more mundane framing phenomena.  The "I" that I am exists as a convocation of contributing factors--as does the "you" that you are--and when I contend that we have no "parts" at all, I do not mean that we are integral beings--far (entirely far) from it.

What is integral about us is the truth--ascertainable by God alone--of the conjunction-result of the factors that frame us.  If it be said therefore--and I am not equipped to contest it--that indeed we have such "center" as this divinely-ascertainable truth about us, then I will answer only that the very humility and piety of which I made mention above compels us to realize that this "center" of ourselves in known only to God.

What can be known only to God does not exist in any substance for us--and this admonition exists for us in greatest potency about the matter of us thinking we know ourselves.  We can imagine we know how the parts of ourselves interact with our world, and we can imagine--though with far less potency--how the parts of ourselves war with each other--but the notion that we know ourselves in our very centers is ridiculous.  As ridiculous as the notion that we can understand ourselves as distinct from our Creator.

The Embodiment of Alienation

In my last post I wrote:

Typically for our species, we try both to discern designs and to implement designs.  From this source of impetus--so reflective of our Creator as a designer, and so deleterious to us ourselves as beings who rationalize transgressions--we create everything from worldviews to excuses for the least of ungodly behaviors.  Nothing, tragically, so characterizes us humans as our twin tendencies to squirm away from the shame that ought ever to center us upon God, while also we turn away from what we ought most fundamentally to think and to do, placing ourselves in the service of the endless designs created by us--and which become our counterfeit "creators" in whose service we can commit the most heinous of acts.

This is the story of humanity.  When "shame" rather than "guilt"--the universal "shame" aspect of our existences rather than the particularized "guilt" aspects of our actualizations--is the recognized point of emphasis, then Genesis makes sense.  We--and everything else that is not God--are burdened with shame as surely as we are burdened with existence.  This must be so.

God designed us to enter existence as we do.  To say that God designed us to be created beings less than God is essentially a tautology--we cannot be the "created uncreated," and we cannot understand why God would create anything, but we can reckon that it is not ours to question the matter.  We can reckon, however, that a God who created us with the capacity for shame has created us with the uncoerced opportunity to assimilate and make use of such an appreciation of our deficits.

Contrary to this is the theologians' mistaken consensus that "sin" is the source both of humanity's woes and humanity's shame.  Rather than being designed as lesser beings in every regard (and granted therefore the chance at least to feel shame in concert with, and in proportion to, our limitations), the humanity of the theologians' conceits is the created-in-God's-image-as-moral-agents species whose original innocence abutted in perfect reflection the moral quality of God--a hideous blasphemy.

A creature that was always lesser than God in every way has at least the opportunity to feel ashamed against the perfection of God, but a creature that was comprehensibly "sinless" from the start was a godling, and a creature that ever imagines itself to be fallen from a perfection of God is indistinguishable from a demon.  That we--all of our imperfections thrown into the bargain--were created to be lesser beings than God makes sense (so long as we are willing to believe that we have a Creator), while the notion that we were created as co-possessors of a divine and at-one-time pristine "image" of God as a moral agent is fantastic self-delusion.

Inherent in this "fantastic self-delusion" is a design on our part of a latter twin of our original creation (and of our original Creator.)  There is at first the imagined God who creates humanity as sinless, followed by a seen-only-after-the-fact God who is pained to see Adam fall into the trap that this inserted-into-the-story God knew from the start would ensnare the man.  This latter "God" is a creation of humanity's design, and this former version of God (the true and original Creator) has been wrought by humanity's conceits into a background figure.  We begin, with our delusion of original sinlessness followed by delusion-upon-delusion about sin as we define it, to layer over our receding appreciation of an ineffable Creator first one, and then another, and then another design of God as we choose to see him.  As I quoted myself above,

Nothing, tragically, so characterizes us humans as our twin tendencies to squirm away from the shame that ought ever to center us upon God, while also we turn away from what we ought most fundamentally to think and to do, placing ourselves in the service of the endless designs created by us--and which become our counterfeit "creators" in whose service we can commit the most heinous of acts.

The tragedy of Genesis is not foremost a tragedy of sin, but a tragedy of design practiced by humanity.  Or call it a tragedy of conceit.  Or call it--if the language serves best--a tragedy of the sin (for the man is never understood in Genesis to be sinless) actualized in humanity attempting to recapitulate the creation process--the conjuring from the recesses of humanity's murky selves satisfying designs of the world we conceptualize around us.

In reality, the shame of limitation spawns the shameful creation on our part of inherently limited conceptions of reality--or what we like to think of as reality.  Indeed, the very act of conceptualizing something--gathering the available parts of what we have decided is "something" into an analyzable and communicable conceit--is inherently limiting.  That is what we do, and that is what Adam did, and I am not forgetting that I presented the promise that the inchoate "shame" precincts of the Genesis story would make more sense when examined than would the silly sin-story we have made of the Forbidden Fruit--a story that is imagined ridiculously by the theologians to mark the alienation of the created from the Creator, when inescapably the created-Creator term is the embodiment of alienation itself.

Our Counterfeit Creators

I think I need to provide a sketch of where I think this blog's emphasis on "shame" is going.  One of the chief elements of shame as an underpinning of our understanding is my contention that shame is both dimensionless and unconnected to describable prior events in a person's experience.  "Sin," on the other hand, consists of either some violation of a describable tenet of proper existence, or must be constructed in that groundless and more-or-less-vaguely-blasphemous idea of "original sin."

Humans made "in the image of God" and liable also to sin are--by a rather inescapable definition--creatures in their sin-tendency most definitely not "in the image of God."  It is usually the maneuver of theologians to contend that the "image of God" idea--since of course it cannot be said that we "look" like God, or indeed that we share any "perfect" quality of God (assuming, as a matter of simple prudence, that God has no "imperfect" qualities)--is an idea of a unique "image of God" quality through being of the shared character of moral agency.  Unfortunately, exuberant paragraphs could be spent on the storehouse of Scriptural evidence to the effect that both the invisible hosts and the beasts of the field are creatures of moral agency.

None of this can allow us to wish away the conclusion--as intrinsic to our thought-lives as any other postulate--that there is something "unfair" about being created liable to sin and therefore liable to judgment.  This realization about a limitation in ourselves ought to be enough to convince us that we are not so much as shadows--let alone "images"--of God's moral character.  God is beyond understanding.  The least we can do in regard to this reality is to sweep away any humanly-introduced barriers between ourselves and the God whom we do not understand, and the most insidious of these barriers is the conceit that we are in our most basic of understandings convicted (or, to our eternal peril, not convicted) of our sinful state.  We are not fundamentally convicted--we are fundamentally (and in our first impressions of life) shamed.

The infant--who of course is taken by Jesus to be the proper representation of proper existence--experiences shame, rather than guilt, as an initial experience.  It is the adult, or perhaps the adolescent, who can process the notion of being blameless of an innocent transgression of some norm (and even then the temptation to exclude possibilities of willful or negligent ignorance is ever-present.)  To the "little child" a reprimand--or, more primally, a rebuff--is a source of shame coterminous with his or her first understanding of a surrounding world populated by others.  Guilt, on the other hand, must be processed upon the beginnings of an understanding of the particular transgression.  Shame is primal.  Guilt is not.

So now we can return to the idea of humanity "in the image of God."  Of course the matter of the meaning (or possible meanings) of the Hebrew is a subject for scholars, but enough uncertainty has remained for it to be an open question whether the original Hebrew indicates "image" as a pattern of the creation of humanity, or "image" as a sustained conception (an "imaging" synonymous with God's support of existence itself) such as it be the case that humanity exists as a function of being in the mind of God.  Perhaps more acutely, there is Rabbi Akiva's conjecture that man is blessed in being created according to an image (or design) of God.  In this latter conceit, there exists the possibility that creation other than humanity is a subordinate skein of designs supportive of human beings as the "crown of creation."  Certainly, man and woman (described in both sexes and present at first in the awkward chronology of the Creation Story) seem from the very beginning to be the point of the whole process.

This humanity is made upon a template--for no believer can deny it--of limitation, no matter how much the "image of God" imagery is invoked.  This limitation exists from the very start, and this limitation is not describable in any particular.  Humanity is not God.  The infant experience of humanity--as a species as well as individuals--is the shame of limitation rather than the guilt of transgression.  And this shame is in its basic qualities dimensionless and global to the person.  Shame exists before we can make sense of our existence, and shame exists even as we try to make sense of our existence.

And "trying to make sense of our existence" is what we do as humans (more so, at least, than other earthly creatures.)  Typically for our species, we try both to discern designs and to implement designs.  From this source of impetus--so reflective of our Creator as a designer, and so deleterious to us ourselves as beings who rationalize transgressions--we create everything from worldviews to excuses for the least of ungodly behaviors.  Nothing, tragically, so characterizes us humans as our twin tendencies to squirm away from the shame that ought ever to center us upon God, while also we turn away from what we ought most fundamentally to think and to do, placing ourselves in the service of the endless designs created by us--and which become our counterfeit "creators" in whose service we can commit the most heinous of acts.

Fear is the Blood

I heard a radio preacher recently carry on at length about how the whole of Christianity's scorn in the eyes of the world--culminating in the done-in-the-name-of-mistaken-righteousness killing of Christians--is a scorn that can be seen arising in the sin of Cain (culminating, of course, in his killing of the righteous "prophet" Abel.)  Most particularly, the preacher's focus was on the salvation-economy represented by reliance on faith in the prototypical--foreshadowing the Crucifixion--sacrifice, in opposition to the world's revulsion at blood sacrifice and the corresponding determination of the world to make the journey to God through other beliefs, other rituals, other works.

It is not merely to the cynic, nor even to the skeptic, to point out that Genesis indicates in no way that Abel's "blood sacrifice" is superior to Cain's "bloodless sacrifice" by the simple fact of the animal death.  (The commentators are forced to admit that, under the Mosaic Law, bloodless sacrifice was entirely acceptable.)  Nor is it to be assumed that a faulty sacrifice--rather than the downcast attitude for which God upbraids Cain--is what puts God and Cain asunder.

Indeed, God charges Cain with the duties of doing well and of overcoming sin, not with some duty to merely possess such "faith" that would by some inexplicable means qualify Cain as a recipient of the unmerited salvation that comes to those who believe in Christ's gracious sacrifice--although of course in the glare of circumspect analysis, it would still be a "work" for Cain to exert such faith, even if the sacrifice he could offer and the righteous life he could live can be--Calvinism-like--called the outworking of a salvation already possessed through pure, unmerited grace.  Of course Calvinism in any undiluted measure is inane, and it is no surprise that any "unmerited faith alone" analysis would show the whole story of Cain and Abel to be insubstantial blather.

What is important to us here is the corresponding fact, found in the vaguely-described story of the two brothers' respective sacrifices, that the element of "blood" is not particularly mentioned--while in the ensuing story of the first murder God says that the blood of Abel cries out from the ground.  Then, after the Flood, Noah is described as sacrificing animals to God--again, without mention of blood.  Blood, rather, features in God's ensuing description of how humans--and animals, infused now with a dread of humans--would be liable for the blood of slain persons.  And the price of killing would be to have one's own blood be shed as punishment.

It is said in Scripture that the life is in the blood.  This leaves us with the awkward realization that creatures exist, and undeniably live, who possess no blood--whether these be one-celled organisms (or many more complex ones), or one-celled fertilized embryos (or those with many more cells.)  Inescapably, the notion of "blood as life" is possessed of two notable characteristics.  First, the notion is evocative rather than factual.  Second, the notion is of dwindling application in any event as a more and more expansive (and therefore simpler) conception of "life" is applied to other than the flesh-and-bone creatures that leap first to mind.  Plants live, and germs live, and viruses live, and replicating proteins live--and who-knows-what "live."  Describable as attentive to--and responding to--the voice of God (or even of believers), the entirety of Creation "lives."

In the conceptualities of the Creation addressed in the teachings of Jesus, everything can be roused to action, or guided in direction, by the speaking of the divine, and it would be insipid to insist that a bright-line demarcation can be drawn across any frontier of Creation in this regard.  Jesus cursed a fig tree for its fruitlessness by proclaiming that it would never bear fruit--that the fig tree withered away as a consequence would seem to be a withering from shame or despair, since withering is not necessitated by fruitlessness.  This might seem to be silly musing, but it really is true that Jesus commands the waves to be still, and says that faithful disciples of his could command the mountains to move.

All of Creation fears God--or at least is capable of fear.  All of Creation lives--or at least possesses innate life-capacity.  Most pointedly, all Creation is liable to being roused--willingly or not--by the ineffable, irresistible speaking of God, and all Creation is attuned to the holding of its animating essence--its "life's blood"--as against possible traumas, whether divinely-caused or not.  This is the Creation created by Jesus, and this is the Creation that has no existence without him.

What this all leads to are twin realizations that are really not at all profound, yet usually escape us because of our pitiful vantage-point as against our surroundings.  First, Creation--being never more than "very good" rather than perfectly suited in any regard for a perfect purpose of God--is a Creation that is spurred beyond its normal state by the commands of God, whenever and however such commands are issued.  The elements do not leap in perfect obeyance to the will of God, though our conceits or our poetry might contend so.  Understood in the searing light of logic, the elements of Creation are defined in their existence by fearfulness of God.

Second, the "blood" that is the "life" of the creature is not some particular fluid or corpuscular element, but rather a metaphor of life itself.  The Jesus who contended that food does not enter the body, but rather passes merely through, was not founding his authority upon biology, microscopic or otherwise.  Similarly, the "blood" that is the "life" in the context of Jesus' world-view is secondary in the application to the mysterious life-force that it represents.  The Jesus who created Creation infused it, and infuses it still, with the essence of himself (and it would be nothing without him.)  His is the blood of existence itself--understood in the searing light of logic, the elements of Creation are defined in their existence by the permeating ministrations of the Son of God.

This leads us to the Jesus of the great sacrifice of himself.  His blood to be poured out was himself, in sacrificial substitution for imperfect Creation, and his dread of his impending suffering was a sacrificial substitution for the experience of existence of Creation--a most acute experience for us, but an experience that we can only with revolting conceit assume to be spared the Creation which writhes under our sins.  In the most basic and rawest of conceptualities, fear is the blood of all that we can comprehend existing, and it is in a horrid yet perfectly holy progression that Jesus would spill the pure blood that Creation cannot, and would--resounding in the agony of his cries--endure the pure fear that we the created cannot.