Fear is the Blood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Creaturely Predicaments

The Ryrie Study Bible (KJV) of 1978, which I imagine can lay claim to being one of the more conservative sources of commentary, says this about the Book of Job:

Though at times Job reacts with hostility, he always turns back to God.  Much of what he says later is exaggerated, untrue, and virtually blasphemous, but he never renounces God.

The perennially arduous task of the conservative commentator is plain here, and one would prefer not to dwell excessively on the travails of commentators who have to claim that a person can turn back to a God whom that person had never renounced--to say nothing of the need to come up with a phrase like "virtually blasphemous."

What is important for us to remember is the fact that this predicament of the commentator--this assumed requirement to spread a matter flat like some parchment on a table--is not only unnecessary, but positively deleterious.  The search for the "strait gate"--a pursuit that is seemingly left in its particulars to the efforts of theologians to resolve upon some "salvation economy"--is in fact understood properly as the believer stumbling from one non-resolution to another.

This deleterious tendency to insist upon resolution of matters is as old as humanity, and crouches in the very shadows of Genesis.  Year after year and age after age preachers lament how the devil's question to Eve, "Did God really say?" (or "Hath God said?") is what precipitates the somehow-not-describable-as-sin-yet quasi-sin of Eve "questioning the Word of God."  What should be lamentable most at the outset of such considerations is the usually-ignored fact that the devil is questioning Eve's recollection, not God's pronouncement.

Surely the "very good" pre-"Fall" Adam and Eve were no more perfect than anything else in Creation, including in the capacity for recollection.  Eve--especially an Eve unencumbered by the theologians' insipid notion that she or her mate were ever "without sin"--could wonder whether or not she recalled correctly a prohibition against eating the fruit.  This still leaves the fruit untasted, leaves Eve and Adam exquisitely well-nourished, and leaves the question of the prohibition a live issue for Eve to bring up at God's next cool-evening visit.

Eve, unfortunately, sets out to resolve the matter there and then.  That's the way we sinful humans are.  It may well be argued that self-actualization, or rather the impulse to self-actualization, is what makes us what we are.  "Actualization" hinges upon the existence (or the intellectually-conceived existence) of a set of circumstances, and "actualization" occurs when we exert our wills upon our circumstances.  None of this has to be real--what is "real" is our momentary, localized, time-and-space knot of experiences.

Eve acted within her self-conceived set of experiences.  Job acted within his self-conceived set of experiences.  Eve's subsequent set of experiences was less desirable than Job's--or was it?  Job, as it is credited to him, knew well enough to "repent in dust and ashes."  We know well enough of the account of Eve's "curse" from God after the "Fall," but do we know whether or not she (metaphorically, at least) repented "in dust and ashes"?  Does Eve not credit God later with having helped her "bring forth a man?"  This is the same Eve who is succored Job-like for the loss of an offspring, with Seth to replace Abel.

What we know about Eve in the immediacy of the great sin she committed is the fact that she sought a resolution of the question before her.  Job, in his anguish, can be characterized most charitably as having wrestled with temptations and questions about God--and having clung in some slipping yet frantic fashion to a countervailing notion of God as being just--unaccountably, mystifyingly just, but just nonetheless.  The question of Job's fate hung not on the presence or not within Job of that welter of sins that is the lot of humanity, but rather in Job's writhing engagement with his questions about God as being live--with questions that he spared the finality of his wife's taunting dare to "curse God and die."

These two Satan-mediated episodes encapsulate the proper understanding of Satan as a liar and the father of lies.  That "lies" exist in the communications of the universe is not the pivotal issue that we imagine it to be.  As long as we are imperfect beings, and imperfect thinkers, and imperfect communicators, then for so long we are bound to incessant, impenetrable blurrings between lies and mistakes.  When we speak, Job-like, of things we do not understand, are we lying--even though we imagine we are but speaking our best understandings?  Do we understand anything so thoroughly as to presents any such understanding as perfect before God?

It is the question of resolution that solidifies and renders potent the nature of lies.  Taken in themselves, Satan's supposedly "devilishly" penetrating assertions to Jesus in the Temptations episode are fascinatingly moronic.  Four thousand years to rehearse, we might imagine ourselves asking of Satan, and that's the best you can come up with?  Yet we who can never cease to remind ourselves of the extremity of Jesus' sufferings on the Cross, can scarcely imagine what Jesus in the earlier episode had endured for forty days in the desert.  It is not the saying of lies, or listening to lies, or considering lies, or weighing lies one against another, that is the true poison of falsehood--the true poison of falsehood is the elevation of any of the effectual falsehoods that constitute our thought-lives into ostensible "truths" that fester and grow rancid when hidden away from examination.

The notion of truth versus falsehood is the interface between the world we imagine that exists and the selves that we imagine we possess.  Just as our "selves" are things we live with--and I mean that in the true experiential sense of selves we observe as though outside them, selves that shift and throb with constituent, nebulous characters--our "worlds" are things we live within, things that are really shifting and throbbing conceits to which we assign variable values in veracity and importance.  We can cling to ourselves--or imagine we are clung onto by, it makes no difference--the various component thoughts and impulses that comprise us for good or ill, or we can wrench from God the privilege of defining ourselves, imagining that we know ourselves as stable point-sources of awareness.  We can remember that we are disparate, writhing parts that comport with the demon-traversed households of inner life of which Jesus speaks, or we can imagine that we are self-possessed souls of greater or lesser awareness of our own limitations--godlings of indifferent capacities other than our imagined abilities to know ourselves.

As I wrote just above, in comparison to our "selves," our "worlds" are things we live within, things that are really shifting and throbbing conceits to which we assign variable values in veracity and importance.  We can cling to the unresolved issues which bedevil us, thankful (as often as we can remind ourselves to be) for the ineffable overarching presence of God, holding onto as many live issues as we can as indefatigable wrestling-partners--for issues with which we wrestle are issues that can cede to us, however reluctantly, the wisps and whispers of as-yet-unimagined prospects.  Or we can pile up ostensible "truths"--that is to say, humanly-appreciated ostensible truths--that is to say, "lies."

Anything that comes out of our mouths is a lie--objective or scriptural warrant notwithstanding.  This is more than the fact that we cannot understand or communicate things perfectly, although even that set of limitations ought to give us pause in attempting to believe we speak "truth."  We do not even speak with single voices.  Our voices are produced by congregations of internal voices springing from disparate and shifting elements of our riotous inner lives, and the ears of our hearers are but conduits to their own internal crowds--if they are words that can even be heard by our hearers over their inner cacophonies.  This is the thrust of Jesus' admonitions to his opponents about how they followed the inventions of their forebears.  It mattered not if a commandment of the Law was genuine or rooted in Scripture--what mattered was the fact that the commandments (as, indeed, any notion of God or holiness that we utter) had been rendered the effectual property of generations and generations of crowd after crowd.

We are each knots of writhing internal voices, and we each live in worlds of wrestling world-conceits.  We can muster up thoughts and voices to cry unto God, and it seems scarcely a question, whether we would do better to issue such pleas from the self-appreciated roiling dust of our acknowledged inner confusion and confabulated world-views, or attempt to present our pleas to God from sedate notions of seemly humility before this or that conceptualized altar.  Jesus would have us resolve our potentially unresolvable issues with this world before we presume to approach the altar.

Better to cast our voices to the altar from afar, as ever we can, even as we scramble and slip in the dust and ashes of our creaturely predicaments.

By Necessity Off Center

Our understanding of our condition will be always in terms of metaphors.  When thinking of the things of God, a reserve to the effect that we will never understand such things completely--for surely this is simple prudence--will produce by logical necessity the realization that all of our thoughts are metaphors.  We do not "know" reality--we can do no more than cultivate an increasingly reflexive, responsive, and yielding apprehension of the conceptual figures that impose themselves upon us.

"Reality" does not "exist."  Reality happens--one figure after another of cognition striding alone or with myriad others in a jostling parade across time.  Reality happens--one figure after another of cognition looming alone or with myriad others out of a heaving landscape across space.  This is the reality of "reality," and we know this to be so.  All attempts to ground our conceptual existence upon what can be "known" are folly.

We can claim that we are but flickerings in some giant computer simulation, but of course, as long as "computer" as a term is applied as though the entire observable universe were but some humongous quantum computer (or that the "computer" of the conjectures could be greater in scope than the universe), then the conjecture is not falsifiable.  More importantly, a brand of conceptualities have been incorporated here to the effect that the "computer" in question is but a surrogate for a clumsily described "god."

We can claim--as an example meant in contradistinction to the immense materialism just described--that we are non-corporeal point-sources of awareness.  These, then, would be our souls (if the common religious term is applied), a term which would be applied most appropriately--in the lexicon of the religious believer--to our "selves."  Unfortunately, as long as we admit (as we must) that we can forget things or that we can be affected by our unconscious as well as our conscious minds, then the "soul" conjecture is not falsifiable.  More importantly, a brand of conceptualities have been incorporated here to the effect that the "self" can be the object of self-apprehension--the self asserting itself in a clumsy determination to claim the self-assessment of a "god."  (That the self's self-accorded right to self-assessment might be humble or apparently unsparing is to tend to magnify, rather than lessen, the horror of the original unwarranted assertion.)

To repeat the present blog description--God has no edge and we have no center.  We do not know ourselves, and we do not know God.  What we might say about God will be reflected back at us by the sphere of our limitations, and what we might say about ourselves will be reflected back at us by the cloud of all-in-parts and parts-in-all that is the self we think we know--as though the vantage-point of our knowledge was not by necessity off-center.