Form Follows Phenomenation

Christianity, for all its purported affinity for mysteries and paradoxes, does not really rest comfortably with uncertainty--despite the inescapable considerations inherent in an ancient faith and a fragmentary, assembled scriptural basis.  If it be maintained that Christian belief is founded--even if only in part--on exposure to the biblical text (and there do not seem to be viable ministries maintaining otherwise), then the latent fissures in Christianity's scriptural basis are not long hidden from any more-than-casual adherents.  The same study Bibles that are prefaced with claims that Christian belief is simple and straightforward are littered, throughout the books and from start to finish, with disclaimers about differing translation possibilities and references to this or that assemblage of the "best" ancient copies.

One of the last and most fiercely defended strongholds of "simple" Bible interpretation is the insistence on the merest of physical descriptions as being beyond question or ambiguity.  If Jesus is represented as saying that the mustard seed is the smallest of all, then one need not search with great difficulty to find some preacher who will assert that "science" agrees with Jesus, though "science" would be hard-pressed to second Jesus' assertion that plants spring from seeds that have of necessity "died."  If Genesis says that "light" existed from the moment of God's utterance, then physical light--understood by "science" in terms of photons--must have existed, though awkwardly Genesis does not until later describe the creation of the sun and other stars.  Well, why ought we not then to postulate light emanating from volcanic activity?  I mean, what's the harm in that?

However, there is an inevitable grinding-down of our capacity to appreciate biblical teaching when we exhaust ourselves in chasing rationales for this or that explanatory theory of aspects of God's creation activity.  Here we need to consider John's prefatory recapitulation of Creation as being a much-needed slap-in-the-face to the reader.  Jesus is here associated with the creation process through-and-through.  The Jesus who was at pains to make God's "very good" Creation is also the Jesus who feels the pains of every element of Creation.  If this be not so--or if commentators would assert that this be not so--then such commentators must bear the burden of proof.  Was it not lamentably Jesus' undertaken task to create animal help-meet candidates for an Adam who was beset by a need, a need Jesus would have felt through the Adam for whom he cared?  Was not it the case that the inestimable and innumerable agonies of Jesus on the Cross included pains for the eternal sufferings of all of his beloved though alienated fellow partakers of humanhood?

Can it be said so simply that the divine of which Jesus partakes created the Creation without any element of infused suffering (and here the Genesis reference to God "resting" provides the echo of a laugh)?  Can it be said that Jesus departed this Earth to an eternity of bliss in the company of the Father, when the comforting confines of an endless, blessed future are suited merely to stunted creatures like us who live "in time"?  Clearly, the first stirrings, and the final tailings-off, of any of our musings about the divine must reckon that the first and last inklings we can have are but suggestions of phenomena to which we can claim only imperfect experiential reference in describable things.  Clearly, if "light" existed at first in the mind of God, then it existed as a phenomenon that need not have awaited its material expression to "exist."  When God created "light," he called into being that which for us can be only suggested by our concept of "light."  The ancients' notion of the primary "element" of "fire," and our modern notion of photons and such, are mere sequelae to what God called across the impenetrable and unquantifiable threshold of "being."

God created a world that is introduced to us in Genesis as a world-not-world.  What else are we to make of a thing that is "void"?  God called into being light-not-light.  God raised Adam from dust before there was a process to create dust.  God called forth not plants, but rather the existence of ground latent with the generation of plants.  God called forth not animals, but rather a still-more-fantastic soil pregnant with the substance of beasts.  Our weak intellects can do no more (or at least I contend so in my weak intellect) than reckon that God created the phenomena of which Genesis speaks.  Inescapably, the operative definition of "phenomenon" (that which can be shown to exist) is our own little infantile play-toy on the scale of things cosmic or supra-cosmic.  We act out of necessity when we reckon things as existing when we can observe them (or imagine them as observable), but we wobble always along a precipice looming over our descents into silliness and hubris.

We say often that form follows function, but this aphorism is a perfect example of our awkward relationship to phenomena at large.  Clearly, the "form" of anything following its "function" presumes that the function element intrudes into the equation from an existence-state of some prior situation--a prior existence-state with its own forms, forms attributable to some even more prior state.  This is where our capacity to understand (or perhaps I should say, to assume a posture of sage "understanding" about) any foundational biblical premise breaks down.  Here we have no starting-points, and no ways to grasp the immediate processions from said starting-points.  The Creation stories (for there is more than one) present a perfect example.

Sadly, many commentators hold to the presumptuous notion that the particular story of God forming Adam from the dust of the earth is a "zooming-in" on the first making of humans, with Genesis' prior reference to the creation of humanity at large being merely a description on a larger scale.  Of course, the presentation of the making of animals--before humanity in one story, and after Adam's demonstrated need for companionship in the other--is but one example of the silliness of the "zooming-in" notion.  There is no reason to think that something that cannot be described within the ken of human beings would be presented to human beings as though it was something amenable to being parsed out.  God in his majesty created the world, and this (the First Story of Creation) is presented in sweeping and general terms.  God (as understood in the preface to John) created the world in a process-beyond-understanding through and with his Son Jesus, and this Second Story of Creation demonstrates the bonds of affection and strains of alienation intrinsic to an existence of humanity that Jesus both authors and shares.

What we see in the Bible is not form following function, but rather form being imposed on pre-existing things of God, things by God, things from God--all sorts of things imaginable and unimaginable, all sorts of things that (as shown in the breakdown of our intellectual capacity that manifests paradoxically as fantastically complacent hubris) we would expect as a matter of course from things having to do with the divine.  This, perhaps most importantly, ought to be the focal-point of our consideration of our evil and our sinfulness--and our hope of pardon.  We cannot see back into the first moment of humanity's alienation from God, though we disgrace both ourselves and our species if we pretend that we can see only essential innocence in that petulant adolescent Adam pre-Fall.  The stepwise descent of our first ancestors in the Garden cannot be related to some pristine starting-point, and so the denominations have decided that the so-called Fall will stand for that point, and the whole rest of the narrative will be twisted around it.

Sinfulness is not a "thing," such as to be reckoned distinct for us from an innocence understandable as perfect conformance to the will of God.  No degree of rebellion or impiety or whatever can be possibly rendered into a necessary conceptuality of smallness really imaginable by humans, on the one hand, and really representative of truth on the other hand.  What we see in the story of the Fall, and in the story of Adam's misalignment with his Creator beforehand, is God's placement of form upon a pre-function, ineffable state--the state of humanity's possible alienation from God that is a state receding backwards in time to the inconceivable.  The eating of the fruit imposes upon Adam a (fallible) understanding of formal evil, the presentation to Adam of his desired mate imposes upon him a duty of proper treatment of her, the presentation to Adam of possible animal help-meets imposes upon him a duty of proper appreciation of God's creative acts, the presentation to Adam of the Garden of Proximity to God imposes upon Adam the not-to-be-forsaken opportunity to commune in satisfaction with his Creator.  This regression has no end-point we can understand, for alienation from God has no smallness that can be ever reached or postulated.  

That Adam would fail in all of these regards ought not to be surprising to us, because we fail in these and similar regards with every breath.  The crucial nature of our sinfulness, and the pervasiveness of our sin-nature, ought to impose upon us the realization that our affinity for evil is not to be understood as a phenomenon, but as a state--and that state is as simple and as undeniable as the fact that We Are Not God.  We are not God--and all else is sequelae.  The story of those sequelae is understood by us as the expression of phenomena, but every phenomenon that we believe we can understand about God is something we always understand too late.

We will never catch up to the fact that we are not God--that is our tragedy.  To imagine that we can plot some course or regimen to that pursuit--that is madness.

New Description for Shame Appears

New Blog Description for Shame Appears:

Jesus became not broken, but bruised and bleeding--blurry like us.  We are not broken by guilt.  We are sodden with shame.

The Great Wound of All

Sometimes the pursuit of truth involves not merely the statement of uncompromising contentions, but more importantly the statement of implications to prior--apparently bold and uncompromising--thoughts, implications that are left latent, implications that languish as orphans, implications that capture no one's attention.

I will start with a certain bold and uncompromising contention.  Arguments for the existence of God are ridiculous.

I know it is not a novel thought, that arguing about God's existence is a fool's errand.  Here my particular take on the subject with be the assertion that believing in the existence of God for "reasons" means merely that one believes in the reasons, not in God.  Any number of godlings can be asserted to exist "because" of this or that reason, but inevitably the "reasoning" entailed thereby must involve observations, assertions, or conclusions on the part of the arguer that must, by definition, have the finality to produce the immediate and immediately adjacent postulated deity.  An indisputable evidence of the existence of a god is as firmly ascribed to by the arguer as the god itself, and the arguer is shown to be a believer in an effectual pantheon, even if this pantheon consists only of the deity paired with the increment of asserted evidence.

God, on the other hand, is the curator of reasons--there is no "reasoning" God out.  This fact is not unknown to Christianity, but like all other things that happen to humanity, the fact of the unknowable nature of God does not abide with us humans--rather it glances off.  "Glancing off" happens in the movement of--and therefore impermanence of--time and space.  The commentators will assert--as simultaneously-held propositions--that the Bible does not argue the existence of God (witness the stately presumptions of Genesis), while also the Bible as canonized includes Paul's convenient presumptions about what other people think when they look up (for example) at the purported majesty of the skies.  Paul does not loiter about, however, to explain how deity found without question in the evidences of Creation was an idea to have been seized upon by third- and fourth- cursed-generation Israelites, cursed when they went in and cursed when they went out, hunching and staggering under skies of storm and drought.

This is the fact of arguments about the existence of God.  They are played-about with by the denominations, because even if they are found abiding by particular persons--persons whose purported constancy beggars belief--even so do such arguments glance about among congregations and schools of thought--now holding sway, now being seen as cheap and threadbare.  God is beyond argument.  God is beyond compare to--or worse still, intellectual derivation from--observed phenomena.

And so belief exists within the person, or it does not.  Or it exists to some extent, greater or lesser.  And the existence himself of God is the least "believable" of all--if belief in God hinges on those impious assemblings of deity and phenomena I described above.  The "argument from Creation" is ridiculous on its own terms--and this argument is made only more pathetic when the notion is added either of godliness supposedly implied by the beneficial quality of Creation, or of godliness supposedly implied by the skillfulness (however fancied) of the creation act.

And, of course, that is not all.  Creation, in the Christian conceit, is cursed because of the sinfulness of humanity.  Not cursed simply because human beings do their lamentable and loathsome things upon it, but cursed intrinsically--so that the very Creation of beauty from which it is said often that we draw, willingly or not, our recognition of the Creator, is at one and the same time a Creation of ugliness.  And of horror.  And of misery.

This is where I must return to my beginning statement, to the effect that certain vast implications of strands of thought can lie neglected not because they are undiscernible, but because they capture no one's attention.  To the Christian, Creation is simultaneously cursed and yet also reflective of the goodness of Providence.  To the materialist, Creation so-called is a neutral mass of matter and energy.  That certain materialists will describe Creation as a hellscape of suffering is merely a retort, meant of ridicule the believers' rapture with divine handiwork that the believer is duty-bound to be enraptured with.  I will hope, however, that certain believers will come to accept that belief in a God worthy to be called "God" is a belief that prostrates itself before a God who can be believed in simply because he can be believed in.

And if God is not to be extrapolated from a--presumably good and well-executed--Creation, then we are no longer under compulsion to ensconce God in arguments for belief that are really arguments that make God contingent upon the supports for belief.  For we do not exist in a good and well-executed Creation.  We exist in that hellscape referred to above.  We exist with the chance to believe in a God of goodness, but it is not to call God "good," to ascribe to him our conceits about what we look about ourselves and call "good."  We do not even have anything but unreliable conceits about Jesus--we do him no honor in condescending to pronounce him "good."  We can only honor Jesus in reaching through our Jesus-conceits toward a lure of goodness that exudes from the ineffable, not from a God who we estimate as being worthy of our babblings about his goodness being "inestimable."

And then at least we can take the Creation-curse notion at face value, for the abiding implication of the Creation-curse is not that we can look around us and see good things with smudges and flaws.  If we see anything around us that we think "good," it is a thing of a moment of time and of a shuddering of space.  The more we look, the more we see Creation as sawing itself to bits, for even those things that we see as timeless (or at least "enduring") are but manifestations of what the scientists call "stratified stability"--momentary aggregations of fascinating interactions of particles that persist even as functions of their non-persistence, that is, of their ceaseless vibrations and permutations.  And eventually these motions will rend everything apart.

What Creation God created at first is represented to us only in our ability to hold conceits for moments, for we have no warrant to look at this or at that and say, This is How God Made It.  Behind this realization is the fact that we have no warrant to conjure up this or that proof that This is How God Is.  At first we can merely believe, and then we can look at what is around us and see not goods to be plucked (or plundered), nor evils to be squirmed away from (or cast into the teeth of those whom we deem more evil still), but rather we can see the great wound of all.  It is this great wound that Jesus dared to encompass, and to which he applied the balm of his ministry--and he demands the same of us.

Would Fly Asunder

There is a bit of lore that is virtually universal in Christianity.  This is the conceit that the world as we experience it--the world that we look upon as the "wonders" of Creation--represents a design that shows us simultaneously, one, the awesome beneficence God presents to us, and, two, the "fallen" nature post-Eden to which we ascribe everything we find disturbing, frightening, or painful.  The "fallen" nature is, of course, placed rightfully on us, but we have an essentially unsurmountable disposition to reckon that we can tease out the evidences of God's design for us by seizing on those things we attribute to the design that is really his alone to comprehend.

Take sex.  There would have been nothing lacking necessarily in a Creation that consisted of a sinless Adam in communion with, and satisfied with, his Creator.  Humanity can exist in one person or many persons--or at least so much must be reckoned possible by us.  In God's observation that "it is not good for the man to be alone," is entailed the entirety of the potential for alienation of one person, or countless persons, from their Creator, who ought to be enough.  Why Adam was not--from the humanly-perceivable beginning--what he "ought" to be (for that is the import of my contention here) is a question that dissolves in our appreciation into the very question of why evil exists to begin with.

To say that it "just turned out" that Adam was not satisfied with God is ridiculous, since God knows everything from the beginning.  Are we to suppose it was similarly an open question (for God, that is) whether or not any animal was going to suffice as an "help meet" for Adam?  To say that God designed Adam to be unsatisfied with his Creator is, of course, a ghastly presumption.  Are we humans, for whom the origin of evil is a question unapproachable, to accord to ourselves the right to determine the framing of that question?  Adam was unsatisfied with God.  Adam was appreciative of his provided help-meet in his self-provided context of her fitting his own needs.  Eve spoke scandalously with the snake.  Eve ate of the tree.  Adam joined her and then blamed God for it.  Are we empowered rightfully to designate any of these points as the instant when the question of evil--unsolvable at any rate--became pertinent?

Much, of course, is made of the trauma of the "Fall," but that trauma did not include the instantaneous demise that would be the logical out-working of God's threat of punishment.  Can we know that God was not forbearing applicable punishment for the couple, or for the one man, from much earlier on?  Any notion of our understanding the "how's" of evil, or of our participation in it, is ridiculous.  It is ridiculous inanity for us to dress up theological contexts for a question the content of which is beyond us,

And then, as I promised above, there is the matter of sex.  There never "needed" to be more than one human being.  There never "needed" to be more than two human beings.  That the family structure came into existence is traceable through a narrative that shows such structure as filling unfolding needs, not as being God's design from the beginning.  (Of course, God knows everything from the beginning, but we do not have time to indulge in the silliness of going through that again.)  The denominations will understand marriage and the family as being under assault by a fallen Creation.  The denominations will even--remembering the Eden curses--understand marriage and the family as being cursed as well.  However, the denominations will embrace to the extreme the ghastly presumption that the designs for marriage, family, and society are aspects of God's "very good" Creation--Jesus' dismissals of marriage, family, and society be damned.

In our very day the conceits of family-, marriage-, and even sex-worship are as lively as ever.  Any human longing for mutually and competently understood fellowship--any such type of echo of fellowship with our Creator--is understandable, but the social-order and social-cohesion missions of religion requires the maintenance of institutions to be defended and coalesced around.  Anything can be reckoned by the denominations as "fallen" or "broken"--anything, that is, except the denominations' cherished social conceits.  The most horrific of congenital disorders, genetic or otherwise, can be processed as evidences of the brokenness of God's Creation, yet understood simultaneously as faint reflections (as are we all) of God's original plan.  But let the notions of genetic intersexuality, or of genetic factors frustrating the conservatives' cherished X-Y duality, or of psycho-developmental variations, be brought into view, and those denominations who hew most closely to God's beneficence over a sin-warped Creation will contort into a frenzy of denial that the paradigm of the male-female binary might deviate at any point from "God's plan."

And hanging over all of this is the potential employment of Genesis in its larger Creation narrative, with its presumptions of humans "commanded" to multiply and dominate.  Of course, as the denominations would prefer to ignore, the beasts of the field and the very elements themselves are the recipients there of commands.  That the story of Creation describes proclivities and roles for its components is no more to be understood in its "Genesis" than are the proclivities and roles for evil.  The question in the appreciation of Genesis is no different from the question looming over all of That Which is Not God--do we reckon the existence of a God beyond understanding, or do we conceptualize a God and flatter that image as reflecting an entity we call "beyond understanding?"

If we hold truly to a God beyond understanding, then we will reckon the pertinent rift in existence to be that which stands between created and Creator.  To bemoan--loud those those moans may be--only the chasm we credit as existing between our fallen world and the way Creation ought to be, is to place both God and our conceits about his designs on the blessed side of the chasm, and ourselves and the rest of everything "fallen" on the damned side.  Needless to say, we have thrust thereby next to God a pantheon of "godly" things that we cannot imagine God's proper Creation existing without--and we have made God himself an idol thereby.

It is the unfortunate function of religion to speak of God in the most expansive of terms, and to squeeze God down into the smallest of conceptions.  Christianity speaks of God as the greatest and biggest thing that can be imagined (which utterances ought, in their presumption, give pause), while yet the God of Christianity is the shrunken fiddler-about with effectually toy houses and toy families and toy marriages--while yet the rest of the universe shivers in concomitant want and exclusion.  Jesus speaks of God as found in the smallest of gestures expressed without reserve or boundary--while yet this is the most fitting and effective ministry before a God who defies even our definitions of dimension.

The world is not fallen.  The world ought not to exist--for that world that ought properly to exist finds its dimensions in God's ineffable will, beyond any of our musings about "beyond."  The world is not a pattern of what God would design--the world is a constantly stitching and unraveling tapestry that carries by the instant pictures that we only in our feeble conceits will try to hold.  Now we have an insight--now it is gone.

These flashings-about are what we need to understand about ourselves, and about those with whom we interact.  We do not really understand ourselves, and we do not really understand others, and anyone who wants to understand the things of God (a necessity of folly) must appreciate this lack of understanding most acutely.  It is pathetic how religion squeezes down our little-to-begin-with set of capabilities, and religion glories in doing just that.  So often do preachers delight is ascribing to this or that person a "scientific" mind, or an "artistic" one, or--whether a female wants it or not--a "nurturing" mind.  We can reckon just as well that one person's mind would be filled with a desire to "make sense" of existence--either conceptually or in terms of fulfilling some outwardly-provided template, while yet another person would be filled with a desire to flatten every conceptual horizon and burst every conceptual bound in pursuit of a notion that God must exceed all.

We might be the greatest of strangers to ourselves or to each other, and no one can be told that there is any bound to the perceivable that ought to be reckoned between ourselves and the God who is beyond all reckoning.  We, of course, will never reach the end of our world or the end of our possible reckonings about our world.  To maintain, however, that there is a divinely-designed world that confronts us is for us to place parts of God's Creation as bounds between us and God--and all a thing needs to be an idol is to have a frame or a pedestal, concrete or conceptual.

Better for us to take Jesus' advice, to hold (or to try to reckon, at least) that the elements of the universe would fly asunder if we but prayed to be one step closer to God.

Language of Our Separation

In my last post, I wrote, in regard to the general conceptions of God's sovereignty, as reflected in conventional Christianity:

"There is also the latent notion, of course, that God can do whatever he pleases (or at least that whatever God does can seem to us nothing more than the caprices of his good-pleasure), but the commentators do not really want to entertain a sovereignty of God that is beyond understanding, even as they tell us that the falterings and fallings-off-at-the-edges of their postulations about God's sovereignty must be taken as mysteries beyond understanding."

It is essentially by definition, that any idea about God has to be revealed as insufficient--the God who is greater than anything is greater than ideas.  What is most incumbent upon us human beings, is for us understand that the us-to-God axis is the most suspect of any trend of ideation that we apply characteristically to theology.  The human being tries to find out about God, and the human being who attempts thereby without warrant to expound upon God is that self-same creature who aspires without warrant to understand the human being.

It is of no avail for theologians to accept merely that all of their ideas about God must, as I wrote, "fall off at the edges"--because, as I contend in my present blog description, "God has no edge."  There is no breadth of ideation to be held confidently about God, even if the margins of the theologians' confidence be conceded by them to be both existent and extremely limiting.  We have no knowledge about God--that is, no effective knowledge about God such as to be knowledge about God that can be lifted out of a single context and applied generally.  There are moments of insight, as fleeting as they are ephemeral, and then they disappear.

All of our thoughts are presumptuous, and it is sad to witness how accusations of presumption lobbed about constitute so much of religious argument.  Our last mid-century's most literate of defenders of Christianity against materialism typify the point.  First, it must be noted that the materialist unaccepting of the notion of God was decried extensively by the religion crowd as fostering depression, angst, meaninglessness, truncation of human potential, and the like, but all of that must be brushed aside if the notion of the pursuit of truth be the matter at hand.

More importantly, the prevailing strain of theological pronouncements among the careful, learned, "let us reason together" religionists was such as to accuse the raw materialist of neglecting numerous realms of human experience that cannot be reduced to the empirical or to the extrapolation-from-empirical.  What escapes the attention of the "let us reason together" theologians, however, is that there is at best incremental improvement in moving from a pure materialist conceit (that merely that which is testable is to be considered), only to light in preference upon a realm of religious thought that claims to spread the predicament of humanity before an ineffable God, while reckoning that certain "time-tested" shared human notions are to be reckoned conceptually inviolate.

If God is beyond our understanding, and if our relationship to God is almost as beyond understanding--our argument having hewn, so far, to literate, mid-century "reasonableness--then we ourselves are beyond understanding.  I am not speaking here about us finding ourselves to be complicated or frustratingly capricious.  I am speaking here about the human's very conceit of being a creature who can say "I am," as being a false conceit.  To run through the progression more vigorously--if we do not understand God, then we do not understand God at all, and if we understand our relationship to God only partly, then we do not understand that relationship at all.  And if we do not understand our relationship to God, then we do not understand ourselves at all.

Of course, the fulcrum of my argument here is that very notion of "to understand."  The post-World War Two theologies and anti-theologies of "reasonableness" (and their precursors and sequelae) were, like so much of our notions of "argument," cousins rather than opponents.  "We" do not deserve to "sit in judgment of God" (as went the religionists' jibe) because God did not etch his name in DNA or in geologic strata, and "we" do not deserve to credit God as the consummate, mid-century gentleman for having laid out before us a terrain of solid, observable phenomena behind which we think arises unquestionably the conclusion that they are his handiwork.  Both the materialist and the literate-religionist lay claim to "reasonableness," when the notions neither of "God" nor of "us" is "reasonable."

We think we exist.  We think we understand what it is to exist.  None of that matters--what matters is that we squirm and reverberate within loci of consciousness that arise we-know-not-where, and that our thoughts moment-by-moment claim only tenuously to be either the center or the totality of "ourselves."  We cannot even claim that our internal fractures and the nebulous quality of our parts (parts that, for all we know, we attain or shed unpredictably into an equally nebulous miasma of surroundings) are to be blamed on "The Fall."

Adam was not told to refrain from eating of the tree because it would be fatally poisonous.  Adam was not told to refrain from eating of the tree because the knowledge of Good and Evil therein would be unwholesome for him.  No, Adam was, rather, told not to eat of the tree because he would be punished for it, because the results would be punitive, because a mechanism of unpleasant results lay in store for him.  Adam was threatened with punishment because his presumable desire to please his God was in potential conflict with his presumable desire to please himself.  When arose this bifurcation in the action-potentialities of Adam, other than in his very creation before "The Fall?"

We hear multiple voices within our self-understood selves.  We reckon and contend, moment-by-moment and year-by-year, with different versions of "ourselves."  Nothing about ourselves could be more true, and yet nothing is reckoned with less by the "reasonable" postulators of a godless universe assimilable by our brains, or even by the "reasonable" promulgators of religion who invite humanity to finger concrete evidences, or grasp communal delusions about "unquestionable" aspects of reality, and to ascribe such evidences and aspects to the hand of God.

What we were created to be, by the hand of God, is a population of wavering experience-loci hearing voices and receiving innumerable other communications from we-know-not-where.  This has always been so.  Adam was assailed by many voices, and Eve was assailed by many voices, and we hear the wind speak, and the birds speak, and our memories speak, and if we were as new and as cast into an unfamiliar realm as the first woman, we would be (as she most famously was) as unsurprised as Eve to hear a snake speak.

We can see where this is going.  If we are, as I have clumsily presented, "experience-loci," then we are deprived even of the simplistic notions that we are discrete beings whose many aspects are only incompletely explored, or that our various parts might be described in unfrightening terms like "fuzzy," or that at the worst that we are individuals whose fractures might be explained--and, it is to be hoped, remedied--as "multiple personalities."  No, we are beings who usually describe ourselves as individual human beings--and we hold only a tenuous warrant to that self-assessment.  Of course, if we really reside--floppy and malleable things though we be--in a universe that can hold even a fraction of the wildness and vitality such as to be commensurate with our bracing moments of appreciations about God, then what else might we expect?

And if we were created as such conflicted and in whole not-like-God-in-every-respect beings, wherein lies any proper notion of proportionality in responsible theology?  We fall in precipitous decline from any exalted (even if "thanks be to God") position to which we might aspire, if ever we dare to view ourselves unsparingly.  We are the "Crown of Creation"?  We know what feeble and conflicted things monarchs are reckoned by God.  We are made "in the image of God" as a sort of pristine potentiality?  We know how much we can disappoint in that regard.  We are made "in the image of God" as a design of God?  Then God knows why we are such a mixture of capacity and incapacity.

Even a reckoning of ourselves as creatures of innumerable down-sides fails to grasp any proportion of our degraded state.  Any notion of apology, or remorse, or recompense, or atonement will fail, even as Jesus casts the demand of perfection before us.  We do things that are wrong, and disgrace ourselves thereby before God, and we fail to correct the wrongs we do, and disgrace ourselves thereby yet again before God.  And yet the denominations litter our paths with assurances that God desires to convict us in our guilt, so that we might claim some offer of atonement.  And yet the denominations encourage us to admit and assess our guilt, as though some speaking, some describing, some measuring of debt frameable as guilt is what separates us from God--for it is our cultural fancy to describe guilt as great, as ponderous, as heavier than can be relieved but by some offer of salvific relief.

But our separation from God is not great--it is infinite.  The effective language of our separation from God is not guilt and its "heavy" connotations--the effective language of our separation from God is shame, and shame permeates our being--it does not merely burden or besmirch it.

That Which Rushes Past Us

It would be difficult to come up with some dystopian version of a human society that is worse than the realities our species has produced.  I am considering here some not-too-implausible regime in which women are subjected to horrible cruelties for the least of transgressions.

Imagine if you will some nation in which a woman could expect a brutal death penalty for being present in the open country, or for driving a car--this much ought to be easy to conceptualize.  Imagine as well that some young woman was observed by the police doing both those things, and that she drove herself into a near-fatal traffic accident trying to escape.

The judge at her arraignment--a man reasonable enough (within the norms of that nation, at least)--might ask her why she drove off in a reckless hurry, abandoning all hope she might have of gaining some measure of leniency from the court.  The judge might believe that the young woman had thought to pursue some vanishingly-small chance of escape, but he would scarcely expect the young woman to say that she had fled in shame and dread because she was wearing a flimsy, low camisole--and did not want to be thought shameless in perhaps attempting to charm her way out of a ticket for driving without a license.

Of course, it would be her gender, and not her lack of documentation, that would be the pivotal point--and, without the vanishingly-small chance of gaining her parents' house, she would be executed for being out alone anyhow.  The young woman's assertion of her independence by her actions was what condemned her, and that was what she knew beyond doubt would condemn her.  The woman's purporting in the event to be transfixed by the thought of her immodest dress might claim the court's attention for a moment, but that attention would crumble quickly into exasperation and dismay.

And then there is for our consideration the young man Adam, asserting his independence (from God, at least, if not from his wife) by eating of the Forbidden Fruit.  That act was to gain for Adam the sentence of death, and yet he and his spouse are transfixed by the notion of being naked?  Naked before each other, as man and wife?  Naked before the God who sees all?  (For surely Adam knows this, and he responds to God who merely asks "Where are you?", and not something like, "Why are you hiding in that strawberry bush?")

No one really knows why Adam and Eve were not subjected then and there to the summary execution that is the obvious implication of God's original warning about the fruit.  It would be as humanly-understandable as anything (if the "judge" in this case were human) for the couple's bizarre fixation on the insignificant issue of "nakedness" to be taken as evidence of their moral immaturity and therefore of their blunted culpability, but this judge is not human.  It would be as flatly-understandable as anything for Adam and Eve's unfamiliarity with "death" as a concept to be cause for God to display leniency, but, again, this judge is God, not human.  There is also the latent notion, of course, that God can do whatever he pleases (or at least that whatever God does can seem to us nothing more than the caprices of his good-pleasure), but the commentators do not really want to entertain a sovereignty of God that is beyond understanding, even as they tell us that the falterings and fallings-off-at-the-edges of their postulations about God's sovereignty must be taken as mysteries beyond understanding.

So we have to listen to the commentators say that the First Couple were indeed to experience "death" that day, in that the innocence that was their shield "died," or that their "life"-giving fellowship with God was broken, or that they were to die by being denied access from that day to the Tree of Life, or that they experienced the "death of the soul" that is the lot of the (as yet) unredeemed.  Of course, if the (almost entirely) stark notion of raw physical death is therefore not to be understood as what God threatened, then we are really confronted with a two-fold and twice-indecipherable puzzle.  We must realize that the question of Adam and Eve's apparent reprieve is not merely a difficult-to-understand issue, but rather is really a meaningless issue--because death itself is not the difficult-to-understand issue we take it to be.  Death is a meaningless issue.

Absent annihilation, every human being is immortal.  Jesus toys with the meaning of the word "death."  Jesus says that he can lay down or take up his life at will--something we pretend we understand, but do not.  Jesus sends out the disciples to "raise the dead," but bizarrely it seems to be taken for granted by them that the only "dead" they can raise are the still-warm or scarcely-cold bodies of the recently (and usually "dearly") departed.  Apparently, poor Samuel cannot hope to be entirely "dead to the world," in that he is summoned by a most unworthy character, and Enoch and Elijah can pass without experiencing death--or did they die without experiencing it, in a manner melding into a spectrum of "quasi-experience" undergone in similar measure by those who pass in their sleep?

The mysteries latent in questions of life and death are of the greatest importance--so great, in fact, that by comparison the notions of "life" and "death" are devoid of meaning--"meaningless"--and they must be at all costs taken so.  No one gives up his or her life who hesitates in the service of Jesus, and, as the merest and most passing corollary, no one gives up his or her life who lingers over the meaning of "life" or "death."

Indeed, the only real way to pursue the giving up of life is to stumble from one instantly-perceived task to the next, and if it seems that conscientious application to every looming possibility in life would mean trying to explore one's relationship (and responsibilities) to it, even as it passes by before one can begin to explore so, then "life" has become more, not of what we travel through, but rather of what "looms" and rushes back behind us.  We are less and less what does the "living" in our lives--and that is all we can hope to live for.

What is to be taken from Scripture--no matter how carefully or assiduously we examine it--is that which rushes past us.  Existence burst forth from nothing--at least, as we might try to extrapolate back from the almost-nothing that is described for us.  That is how experiencing something works.  The imponderable gravity of Adam's transgression is stumbled through in our appreciations even as Adam babbles and flails at insubstantial considerations.  Can we think that humanity would have ever made the slow slog from the warm shadow of the Tree of Life to the other side of the flaming sword if "understanding" what happens to us is really a part of what belongs to us?

We Are Intensely Shamed

In my last post I made yet another reference to:

. . . the Genesis story as lacking in references to "why's" of Creation attributable merely to God's sovereign will.  "Why's" arrive indeed in Genesis, but they are not representations or explanations of God's reasoning behind his creation of imperfect humanity--or of imperfect (remember, only "very good") Creation itself. . . . Adam's needy proclivities (arising as imperceptibly yet as definitively as a narrative might relate) are beyond any human finding-out.  Most importantly--centuries of commentators' cant notwithstanding--this mystery of humanity's moral imperfection is withheld from any of humanity's beseechings, and this mystery frustrates all of the theologians' postulations.

And:

Our moral state--lamentable such as it is--is such as it is because it is such as it is.  Our moral state is such as Genesis describes it--and the text will stand for no other probings.

And so now I must try carefully to describe the moral stature of humanity "as Genesis describes it."  Or--to address the matter more fully--I must describe the real Genesis version of humanity's moral stature, versus the commentators' elaborations of human moral course in what is really their primary source--their predisposition-produced "Genesis story."

Genesis is in itself a story of humanity in need of redemption (a story represented in outline--and in manifestations from the simple to the esoteric--in all of the myriad religions that, as the commentators never tire of telling us, crowd the anthropologies of the globe.)  The commentators' "Genesis story," on the other hand, is whatever thrashing-about they need to do to the text in order to make it a fitting template for the "salvation plans" of their particular denominations.

A perfect example of this is the set of silly maneuverings that conventional Christian thought engages in regarding the Curse Upon the Woman.  The notion of her "desire" for her husband as a physical partner (a notion that must have acridly amused many a forced-marriage bride who was repulsed by her mate from the start) is one take the commentators will espouse, while the notion of her "desire" to rule over her husband (akin to the "desire" for "sin" over Cain, in a rather perplexing Hebrew word puzzle) is yet another.

The clean notion that the commentators will prefer--that childbirth becomes painful for Eve and her gender because of the curse, and would not have been so except for the Fall--is rather besmirched by whatever Hebrew verbiage prevails upon the commentators to say that God will "increase" Eve's pain in childbirth, or that she will henceforth suffer "intense" pain--as though pain was part of the process from the beginning.  It would have been a lot neater, of course, if Eve had been described in detail as giving birth before the Fall, but it is the apparent thrust of Genesis to be straightforward, not neat.

Neither, then, should we expect a neat interpretive scenario for the notion of Eve's desires (although it might be posited that Adam was a rather choice specimen.)  If Eve was anything like Adam, a rather earthy appreciation for his physicality (complicated, of course, by the "flesh of my flesh" attraction and its implication of partiality for one's own flesh) was present in Eve from the start.  And it is unfortunately the case that--rather than conjoining in flesh and combining in child-conception--the first substantive marital occurrence was Eve "ruling over" Adam in the matter of the fruit.

Clearly, the complications of "desire" taking more than one form is present in marriage from the start, but it is just as clear (and just as deleterious to the conventional "Genesis story") that the unseemly desires both for an objectivized partner and for a controllable taken-for-granted partner were present in Eden (in whatever inchoate or miniscule form so as to satisfy the low bar of "sinfulness") pre-Fall.

It is not surprising that the denominations have decided that the quasi-sacerdotal (though, of course, inverted) nature of the Curse proceedings is not to be dispensed with.  There are two things that the preachers will not surrender.  First, they must defend interminably the notion that a "lost" state of innocence is to be regained by the denomination formula in question.  Second, they must describe humanity's sinfulness as an observable series of declines, whatever logical gyrations that might require--humanity is always both indescribably bad and getting worse.

At the start, according to the preachers, there was the Fall.  Then there was the First Murder.  Then there was the Earth Filled with Violence before the Flood.  Then there was the Prideful Attempted Building of the Tower of Babel.  Then there was the establishment of the Covenant (or covenant series, or whatever the preachers find advantageous to posit) through the Faith of Abraham.

The Fall, as I have written interminably, is a theologians' conceit.  No person not ridden with imposed presumptions about the Fall would read the Creation Story and glean from the text a notion that Adam was ever unrecognizable as a human in that he was sinless.  The First Murder was either an act of unsurpassed cruelty (witness the artists' depictions through the centuries of Abel as a youth) or it was an act scarcely recognizable by its perpetrator--the future city-builder who was a convicted manslaughter at the very worst.  The notion that there is some Genesis morality-lesson, some insight into the moral course of humanity, embedded in each episode of story-progression is a notion that prompts us without warrant to construct Genesis-stories of our own.

What are we to make of the Earth Filled with Violence before the Flood?  Are not the other seven persons on the ark with righteous Noah depraved to the core?  Is not the most profound effect of the life of righteous Noah on human history the institution of making some human beings "the lowest of slaves" to others?  Sure, Noah might be said to have perpetuated the human race, but the entire reason for making Noah and his kin-group a choke-point for human populations was so that they would not act toward fellow human beings as Noah subsequently did.

And so then, apparently within generational-memory of the Flood and Noah's curse on the progeny of Canaan, all the peoples of the earth are congregated for the building of the tower.  Inescapably, the years of Hebrew brick-making slavery in Egypt cannot be thought to have surpassed the intensity of the Canaanites' presumable subjection to the greatest of loads and the greatest of painful risks there in the land of Shinar.  Or did the Bible forget that?  Ironically, the comparatively mild tenor of the first peoples' ambition in construction (compared, that is, to the fortresses and human-sacrifice temples and brutal arenas they might have built) was the cause of the greatest Exodus-type liberation (in comparative population-share, that is) in world history.  The sons of Canaan in particular, and the sons of Ham in general, can only be thought to have established their own, unenslaved nations by escaping Noah's curse.  Or did the Bible forget that?  Certainly the Hebrews of the Conquest did not forget the "curse upon Canaan," though they did not seem to have given so much as a passing thought to the fact that the centuries-long preservation of Ham, Shem, and Japheth's blood-lines as pure could have been obtained only by the most assiduous incest among their children and grandchildren.

In short, the notion that Genesis teaches a series of stories about the moral course of humanity is ridiculous--and this farcical treatment of the text is not without lasting real-world implications.  The idea of revivals and backslidings, of good generations and bad, is a pernicious one, and Jesus treats it as such.  Again and again Jesus speaks out against prevailing notions of moral stories--reckoning that the moral state of man or woman is the province of God.  When John the Baptist deprives some Jews to whom he speaks of their treasured, parochial status as "children of Abraham," the Baptist has as much reason as they to understand Abraham as a fierce warrior and a cringing whoremonger, as a man who demanded at one point a sign from God and as a man who is praised elsewhere for not demanding a sign from God.  Anyone can know these frustrating and mutually-countervailing things about Genesis--they are right there in the text of Genesis.

One thing that is of great implication in understanding Genesis as a simple recounting of valuable facts, rather than as a weaving of this or that denomination's idea of an invaluable salvation-plan, is how Genesis can give a plain foundation to understanding how sin actually happens.  Jesus describes how sin happens within a person, but we are more interested in what happens to a person who sins.  In the most sweeping manifestation of this latter interest, as I referred to above, is all of the emphasis that is placed on this or that great moral story--this or that story of depravity or redemption, each cherished all the more in that it is ostensibly (perhaps literally) earth-shaking.  This shows up usually, of course, in all the interest about prophecy and the End Times.

The Bible writ large tells of many things to happen in the future (or, apparently, things that were foretold in the past and then happened), and these foretellings are of most interest to us in that they are understood to be what happens to people when they do good or bad (mostly bad.)  The End-timers are set to the most arcane and labored construction either to actual timescales or--more usually--to supposed expected series of events.  The wags will contend that somehow--surprise, surprise--the apocalypse predictions are always near enough to collect to the predictors the public's interest, involvement, and investment, and always far enough away to provide for a few years or decades of predictive cushion.

What is most striking about Jesus' contribution to the larger scriptural compilation of predictions is Jesus' emphasis on, one, the inability of knowing if the end is centuries or hours away, and, two, the expectation that human life in general will be comparatively unremarkable even up to the end.  The typical End-Timer's frothy fascination with more and more wicked generations finds whatever support it can in the Bible elsewhere than in the teachings of Jesus.  For Jesus, the controlling idea is not that generations get more and more wicked, but rather that in nearly every place and at nearly every time, we become more and more deplorable in our tendency to make our sins more and more contingent on distracting elements that we entertain, and more and more contextualized in our precious and convenient worldviews.

More and more contingent on distracting elements that we entertain, and more and more contextualized in our precious and convenient worldviews.  So Adam, in his being "alone" among distractions--distractions that he drew more and more to himself--when all he needed was his God.  So Adam, in his pronouncement that human social life was to be based on his affinity for Eve--and therefore on her role in meeting his expectations as against all of the challenge that she (and Creation in general) could hold for Adam.  The manifestations of human sin can indeed multiply and grow more fantastic, but they have been rooted in our nature all along, and it is intrinsic to conscientious moral exploration to wonder if the most fantastically sinful of us have not been subject to the most fantastic goads.

And yet is not sin so dreadful that one would ever seek to apprehend it as insidious and unbounded, and as apt to become increasingly insidious and unbounded?  Here, then, is the rub--the notion that all of Creation has become befouled by the sin of humans, and yet is on its horrid way to being more befouled still.  Certainly Jesus sees us as being on the primrose path, doing more and more evil and becoming more and more evil.  What must be understood, however, is that Jesus' approach to understanding sin is not attached to definitive stories or standard narratives, but rather it is an approach that struggles through the storytelling propensity of humanity as an exhausting substrate to be overcome, even as the real drama of the person's interaction with sin is hidden in the recesses of God's knowledge.  The Prodigal was saved because he "came to himself," not because of where he went or who he was with.

Similarly, all of sin is in motion as it courses through the being of our inmost selves, in the "heart" of each of us.  Sin is always getting worse--this is the internalized, substantive, and eternally-significant aspect of sin.  The externalized notion of a world heading downward, of souls heading hell-ward, is as nothing compared to the implications of the sinfulness that has always characterized the human being.  A sin once committed does not lie within us, nor is not even sprawled between us and any whom we have wronged, but rather it is a spreading yet corrupting thing.   Sin is a thing that should not bring foremost repentance (as if it might be apologized away), or anguish (as if it might be punished away)--rather sin should bring shame first, and shame last, and ever shame.  Shame is what we felt first, before we ever knew guilt, and shame should be our first recourse and our lasting companion--theologies and ministries that promise to "take away shame" are plagues.

Jesus tells us that we must make things right before we can approach the altar.  "The altar" must be understood as a metaphor--there are seldom altars present.  But to make things right--that is a task that is always with us, must always be done, and that finally cannot be done.  A God who would make such a demand is a God whose prescription for our sinful selves is the sour balm of shame.  That is what is left to us when we cry out to God for mercy, and that is the "should" that can fill in the inevitable blanks of every rendition of a scriptural story that we are told by others can tell us the right way to be.  We are imperfect beings, we are children of Adam--we are richly blessed, and we are intensely shamed.