Littered with Shameful Things

As I recall from about 50 years ago, the movie version of The Late, Great Planet Earth began with a scene of an Old-Testament-Bible-time false prophet being pursued to death upon being found out.  This filmed notion of the expected fate of a false prophet--intended obviously to attach the intimation that the uttering of prophecies was taken with utmost seriousness--has seemed to me always puzzling in the context of the bulk of prophecies warning of the end of our Late, Great Planet.  After all, no "Bible times" prophet could expect to be found out--if the prophecy in question was either vague enough, or removed enough in time.  One does not expect that the utterance of the prophecy of the Jews being held in Babylon 70 years was greeted with, "We'll see about that."

In our own day, when the End Times prophecies persist as ever, the most revealing questions about the matter are not about what developments are "obviously" fulfillments of this or that prophecy (to be supplanted in turn by subsequent developments which are really "obviously" such fulfillments, and then others which are really, really obvious), but rather what developments in human society can inform our understanding of prophecy in the Bible (and, indeed, our understanding of the whole of the Bible.)

To linger for a moment on the matter of prophecy, it is illustrative to glimpse a hint of the realities of human society as expressed in the ancient texts.  In Deuteronomy is a passage condemning the occult practices of the other peoples of the land, followed by a prophecy of the future appearance of prophets--who would do well to speak truthfully, lest they meet an end like in the movie.  To the obvious follow-up question (and one can almost hear it coming from some precocious adolescent), "How can we know if a prophet is truthful?", the Deuteronomic answer is that a prophet will be found truthful if his prophecy comes to pass.  Unfortunately, the text does not include a prohibition against prophecies of shelf-lives of more than decades, and so we are stuck still with Antichrists and Marks of the Beast.

It is something more than completely childish for a person to ask, "How can we know if a prophet is truthful?", but to sit silently while given an answer that pertains obviously to a mere subset (short-term predictions) is a reaction that cannot be called completely adult.  For all that Paul wants to talk about being a child and then--overnight, it would seem--being an adult, it is on the contrary true that human society (especially as it can include people living long lives of--one would hope--unending development) must involve the notion that adulthood is a continuous unfolding.

And so we must ask ourselves, if we are to hold that the Bible (or parts thereof) can be taken to have true and abiding application, whether the Bible has ever been directed toward, or widely assimilated by, the humanity that the Bible must surely have foreseen.  Are we--that is, this collection of humans of this spate of generations--not the humanity to which the Bible speaks?  Sheer numbers, both of human lives and of increments of human life-spans, weigh in favor of the notion that the Bible, as a potential source of inspired teaching, is only now being read for real.

The numbers are crushing--the graph of human global population rockets upwards so that if (for example) the experience of living in an age in which the apocalypse might be approximated by the push of a button is taken as a collective identifier, most of humanity since the advent of agriculture would be included (or soon will be.)  I used to muse on the misfortune I experienced (particularly acute as a child) in living in an age of potential nuclear annihilation, until it dawned on me how the realities of human life-expectancy and population growth had deprived me of the claim to be among an unfortunate few to be born in my time.

And are we of the modern life-expectancies and population sizes not the preponderant audience of the Bible prophets?  Or, indeed, of the Bible as a whole?  How few people really lived in previous centuries, and of those few, what a slender portion were in any position to "have their feet under them," so to speak, when called to answer to the Bible's pronouncements!  So much of those postulated past populations were children doomed to die or, as they grew, doomed to the intellectual cloudings of slavery or crushing labor.  The modern notion of people being born and--with the exception of misadventures truly understood as "exceptions"--living full and well-filled lifetimes, is paradoxically both a new thing upon the earth, and an extremely common thing overall, if the paucity of prior population-sizes be considered.

That this modern "notion" is often just that--a perception of modern, "civilized," "developed" societies--that is not represented in reality, is not something that I have forgotten.  Many millions, in our earth of billions, are deprived routinely of the chance of fruitful self-development.  What I am driving at here is an appreciation that a long life of continual development, as an ideal if not a perfect reality, is the conceptuality abroad in our modern world.  "Continual development," however, can take two chief forms.  We can choose either to challenge ourselves continually, or to imagine that our lives are step-wise accumulations of accomplishments.  The latter choice is a horrid one, and it is manifested by, among other things, people seizing upon and filing away ideological sureties, and people seizing upon the things of this world in the form of possessions and retirements.

It does not take much--if adulthood is taken merely as the movement past childhood and the movement to ever greater accomplishment--for the "Bible-believer" to squat in wealth and squat in indolence, but this is only because the continual development afforded as a prospect for we moderns (we of the burgeoning bulk to whom the Bible really speaks) is squashed down by us into layers of self-satisfactions each upon the others.  In reality, every moment in which we live is but another moment (perhaps a wasted moment) in which we might realize that our lives must be shaken to the foundations.

And so we are presented with opportunities in our lives to examine the writings of ancients who were "ancients" in their own times at forty, and who wrote in the immediacy for audiences of adolescents.  The staid sages of the Bible eras were old men too soon, always one cold wind or one scurrying rat from death, and they herded populations of teenagers and young adults whose chief milestones of life were watching children die, or convulsing in anguish at the first sign of their youngsters' maladies.

Only by drawing ourselves up to the challenge of imagining those past years can we begin to imbue our understandings with vitality, and it can be a frightening prospect indeed.  When the Israelites returned from defeating Midian, they brought with them captured women and children--only to be told that the women and boys were to be killed.  The New Jerusalem Bible has the stomach to title this section of Numbers as a "slaughter," and indeed it was.  The Midian episode is scarcely imaginable, and a person of any developing and lively conscience would do well in brief intellectual forays to squint and wince at the thought--and to consider that there are abroad in the "religious" world divines of this or that sect who will imagine that one might "meditate" upon this episode.

It gets worse--at least as the notion of serene meditation is concerned.  The virgin girls were to be spared, if "spared" is a word applicable to seeing one's mother, aunts, or brothers butchered like cattle.  And of course, like any other females (that is, girl-children) found desirable to their captors, they could expect forced marriages (or concubinage) and forced bearing of their enemy's children.

The hideous nature of what happened to Midian is wasted upon us--again, as the Bible's preponderant audience--if we refuse to understand how truncated was life in those days.  The "elders" of Israel had to herd into battle, and herd into obedience, male populations who were both painfully young and painfully deprived of opportunities for elevated self-development in their young years.  Maturity meant becoming hardened brutes--who else would hack apart a six-year-old boy?  Or could fail to become a hardened brute in the process?  And as for the power-rape of the girls?  Do we really think young men (that is, teenagers) would be denied that outlet?

And do we really think that we are going to be spared the duty of enduring--again and again and without promised ceasing--self-examination throughout our lives?  Just as an example, there is the challenge of the Christian to find some way--other than besmirching the Holy Bible--to maintain that the slaughter of Midian should not have been ordered (for surely that is what was ordered by the unchanging and authoritative Scripture), when yet there is dangled before the Christian the fascinating yet nebulous fact that Jesus states that Moses' command to allow divorce was a sop to the hardened brutality of the Israelites, and not the will of God.  Allowing divorce, according to Jesus, was inserted (how, in theological terms, we are not told) into the Scriptures, yet the slaughter of non-combatants by the Israelites is to be taken as God's will?

The history of humanity, and of humanity's relationship to God, is littered with shameful things.  The accretion of human inventions upon the core of truly inspired Scriptures would be only indifferently comparable to other shameful things.  The collection of myriad perverse readings of Scripture, and the collection of myriad rationales for not unsparingly examining Scripture, would fit into that shameful mix.

And then there is the twin shame of our failure to understand the inchoate and stunted experience-lives of our ancient forebears, on the one hand, and of our failure on the other hand to accept that growth is the response to shame, and that the result of the response is still more shame, and more challenge to grow.

My Bad 05142026

Yesterday I posted Shame Appears: Design on Our Existences, and I began it with a quotation from me from "May 9" (when I posted not at all.)  I should have written "March 9" (Shame Appears: The Embodiment of Alienation).

My bad.

Design on Our Existences

On May 9, I wrote:

"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."

And for some aspect of ourselves to be inherently limiting is a two-fold assessment.  First, by definition, is the fact that our entire selves are limited (and therefore of a shameful quality before a God who exists supremely above every good quality) and, second, is the fact that an actualization--particularly a conscious actualization--of any one of our qualities is an affront to God.

To put it bluntly, an embracing by us of any conceptuality is an affront to God--as I quoted myself above, "a tragedy of design practiced by humanity."  We do not know the universe in which we sin, and when we ascribe to ourselves any knowledge of that universe we sin yet again.

Of course, we must pursue "knowing," but our collecting of instances of experience with individual things (which experience-processings by us are less than perfect at any rate) into masses of observations from which we extract concepts is at least a thrice-doomed prospect.  We experience imperfectly, we collect experiences imperfectly, and we order experiences imperfectly into concepts.

Much of the difficulty in Christianity on this score springs from Christianity's admixed heritage in classical thought.  The Hellenistic fascination with the "idea" of (for example) "the horse" is a similarly-deformed cousin of some more overtly pagan worship of a horse-god.

Any creation of God is first and foremost a thing in itself--and on this score I must insist on revisiting the Prologue-to-John description of a Creation indescribable other than as mediated by Jesus in every intimacy.  As the "tragedy of design practiced by humanity" begins, Adam is set by God to ordering, in part, the growth of the Garden.  Every bough that Adam twisted to accommodate some design was a living thing disordered thereby from its own inclinations--and every wrenching away from such inclinations was felt by Jesus.

Scarcely could any poet describe a more infinitesimal manifestation of sin's burgeoning--though of course burgeon it did.  In a universe of infinite scale--or, more properly, a prospect of infinite universes that might comprise the Creation of Jesus--there can be reckoning neither that Adam's bough-twistings were little things nor that Adam's bough-twistings were big things.  They simply happened, and in some measure they were not of God.

And the most important realization is the fact that such "happenings"--entwined as they were with Adam's developing capacity to render for himself conceits about existence's designs--were not enough for Adam.  The first man's skein of conceits was growing, and it was growing toward the ordering not merely of the foliage at his fingertips, but the ordering of perceivable existence into a proximity of like beings, of creatures like Adam at least insofar as they might participate with him as agents within a larger perceived milieu.

And so Genesis says that God made out of the earth the animals and the birds.  Notably, this is the same text that makes so much later of Noah's thronging menagerie consisting of animals according to their kinds.  This earlier presentation of animals and birds to Adam in the Garden makes no mention of "kinds" (though presumably there were at least two of every species), yet centuries of commentators have assumed that Adam's process of naming every creature (which is the described functionality wherein their respective "helper" unsuitabilities is revealed) is unquestionably associated with the assessment of "kinds."  Of this assumption there is no scriptural warrant--Adam might have been naming each creature individually, and such a process would have been the more suitable, the more that the original reality of Jesus' mediation of every intricacy of Creation was respected.

Every creature is different, every conceivable existing thing is different--because the ineffable ministration of Jesus to his Creation is ever-present and (at least simple prudence would so dictate to us) every such ministration of Jesus to his Creation has manifold potentialities of which we cannot even guess.  To collect impressions of such creatures and things into "concepts," regardless of the utility therein, is inherently sinful.  And to proclaim, in the frothing theologians' determination to pronounce upon the things of God, that concepts and dogmas and doctrines distill the things of God into "Gospel Truths" is a mountain of sin.  Of course, we all live within a scheme of concepts usually somewhere between the most minute parsings-out of conceits being perhaps overstated, on the one hand, and the propagating of vast, convenient, and oppressive overstatements, on the other.

What is important here is to see the grip that the human propensity for design obtains over people in Genesis.  Adam wakes up and calls Eve "woman" ("taken out of man") not because she is an inimitable, unique creation of God, but because Adam, delighted with her because the she is "bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh," references her according to the organizing principle of his own conceits.

Eve has a set of experiences of her own that bears upon this same reality of conceits.  In a moment of inexplicable wonder (following an ordeal of unimaginable torment), Eve exclaims, "I have gotten a man from the Lord."  How might history have been different if Adam had shown such wonder--rather than fascination with relationship-design--upon being presented with Eve.

Yet it is Eve, in the earlier Tree episode, who sets herself upon a course of design that changes history.  What is most fascinating about the conventional approach to "The Fall" is the realization (as the sceptics never tire of rehearsing) that the devil tells the truth, and that God--if one is to fault God for showing mercy--supposedly does not.  Indeed, as the devil goads Eve into conceptualizing, "the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise," and of course, the tree does make Adam and Eve "like God" in a way.

That a fruit tempting to the eye would be good for food is in line with a certain conceit about reality.  That a store of knowledge would be of value is another conceit about reality.  What was going on with Eve as she reached for the fruit was not so much overt sin (and on this score the sceptics have at the ready the old "how could she know right from wrong before she ate from that tree?" line.)  What was going on with Eve was that sin--or, as I would say, that shameful-created-nature-proto-sin--of effectively lying to herself.  Concepts are intrinsically (and no matter how infinitesimally) sinful.

The shame that goes with being created rather than being God.  The shame that goes with being rebuffed as a child before being mature enough to understand having committed an offense.  The shame that goes with every moment of generalization--that type of convenience of thought upon which we rely even as we detest the notion that our thought-lives are things of convenience.  This is what explains human nature from the very first, and it makes mock of that convention that sin came from the Fall--or that sin can be compartmentalized or understood in discrete terms.

As we trace the development of humanity backward, sin gives way to proto-sin which gives way to shame--and we stumble over the idea that the reverse, that shame-morphing-into-sin, is a smooth spectrum because we seek always to organize and categorize things.  We fall from the bloom of original innocence--from those shocking and design-defying initial experiences we can scarcely remember--and we can never puzzle our way back again.  Like Eve, we can know an initial trauma and blurt out such as her delight in Cain "gotten from the Lord," while yet later we can impose design on our existences, like Eve rationalizing the birth of the precious, unique Seth as "another seed instead of Abel."

The Bewilderment of Shame

We are going to have to decide whether existence arises in an impenetrable question and is expressed in thin yet coherent terms in the Bible, or if existence is held properly to be wonderfully logical and is drawn out for us in a marvelous scriptural tapestry displaying the mind of God.  This latter course is held to most usually by the theologians, who exercise themselves in explaining how this or that thing in God's intended scheme for humanity can be pinned down by appeal to Scriptures arranged arduously in purported "salvation plans."

If, as the theologians claim, God's intentions for humanity ought to be imagined as expressed in terms of a "salvation economy"--that is, some weighing of humankind's moral burden against God's proffered method of exoneration--then it is no surprise that the assessable (or at least rank-orderable) concepts of sin and sin-types would be the seized-upon manifestations of our debts.  Necessarily, an "economy" is founded upon some baseline of measure, and for the purposes of the theologian there is the handy benchmark of "The Fall."

Somehow (in this preponderant set of salvation theories), Eve's scurrilous entertainment of unseemly conversation with the devil differs qualitatively from the "first sin" of eating from the forbidden tree.  How this qualitative distinction is to be justified is a doomed enterprise, but this viper in the nest of the theologians' conceits is a price that is thought worth paying in order to establish the baseline of "The Fall."  The man was innocent, and then the man sinned--this must be so.

Of course it is the premise of this blog that the foundational aspect of humanity's dissociation from God is not sin, but shame.  The concepts of sin and shame can be thought of as disappearing into the miniscule (and disappearing into each other) as we trace the story of humanity back to the source, but it is intrinsic to our operative understandings that "sin" is parsed out into particulars, whereas "shame" is less describable in terms of type or quantity.  We sin by doing this or that--we encounter shame merely by existing.

Humanity was always humanity, and humanity was sinful always and most importantly shameful always.

And Jesus encountered shame merely by being the medium of all that exists in the Creation as described by John.  We pursue salvation properly by allowing ourselves to be subsumed into the shame that is intrinsic to our Jesus-created selves, and we look to Jesus' willing collection of Creation's shame to himself as the offered means of our salvation.

The committing of sin is the increase of proper shame to ourselves, and the poison of sin is our refusal to own the concomitant shame.  Shame, in the accepting or the disavowing, is the fulcrum of the relationship between us and God.  Our shame, properly understood, is unquantifiable and inextinguishable--and howls in our consciences warnings greater than can any prohibition of described sin.  Next to this consideration, the notion of sin is child's play, and the notion that the dread punishment of eternal damnation is somehow commensurate with a finite lifetime of finite sin is enough to fool only a child, a child abused from earliest memory with religion at its toxic worst.

A child can be presented, in a psychologically supportive manner, with notions about sin that are humane and understandable, but the unquantifiable element of shame in any person's life is present in the child from the very beginning, and shame is something that the child needs to learn to manage, not to attempt to stamp out as one would sin.  It was shame that accompanied Adam and Eve out of the garden, for they had already endured the punishment for their sin (and it is surely fatuous to contend that they--who knew nothing of "death"--got off lightly in that their sovereign God relented in their threat to kill them.  To say nothing of the fact that they had not been promised immortality at any rate.)

It is the unquantifiable notion of shame that equates most suitably with the notion of damnation, and we see this demonstrated in Luke.  The ancient notion was that "the wages of sin is death."  In ancient Judaism, and dating back to Noah, the punishment of a murderer was to be executed.  It is the theologians' conceit--and the foundation of innumerable "salvation economies"--that "sin" in its force survives any earthly punishment, even that inevitable death that all humanity has earned.  On the contrary, as I have mentioned, is the story of the Good Thief in Luke.

The Good Thief is being punished, and punished horribly.  Even as he is upbraiding his fellow "thief" for mocking Jesus (and it is usually accepted that the guilty pair bracketing Jesus were more than "thieves"), the so-called "Good Thief" is contending that he is being punished for what he himself did.  The account-book is being balanced, and yet the Good Thief knows there is something more.  Contrasted against the shameless non-God-fearing behavior of his fellow criminal, the Good Thief lays his shame out before a figure whom he equates (with questionable theological insight, it must be imagined) with God.  Sin is being expiated, and yet there is something more to do.

Living with shame, and dying with shame, is that "something more to do"--always.  Endlessly it is contended that Jesus bore a "shameful" death, yet that purported shame (as any that is imputed to anyone without cause) is a "shame" only if the recipient allows it to be so.  And the Jesus who deserved no shame in his earthly life would not lie, either to himself or to others.  No, Jesus did not die a "shameful death," as the theologians imagine mistakenly that he did, and to compound the shame of this mistake with a concomitant neglect of the absolutely-other-than-shameful Jewish regard for the Suffering Servant, is shameful conduct indeed.

No, the living with shame and dying with shame that is the lot of every creature, and that persists in much more volatile and enduring form than sinfulness, is the "lot" of Jesus only in that his overarching sacrifice for humanity--indeed for all Creation of which he is author and medium--is the sacrifice of enduring all shame undeservingly.  The Thief paid his price, and then cried for succor in his unextinguished shame.  Jesus paid the price for all, and then cried out to his father in a pure form of the bewilderment of shame that besets us all, from newborn to the grave.

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.