A Yahwist's Manifesto

No doubt we get into trouble with anthropomorphisms in our God-talk. I rather like Harold Bloom's way of skirting that problem by doing two things. First, he looks at Yahweh as a, borrowing the expression from Nietzsche, "human-all-too-human" literary character and the J author as the first superb literary writer in our tradition (encompassing even Shakespeare -- and for Bloom, that is reluctant praise beyond praise). The J text, if read properly, is blasphemy, says Bloom. One of the great ironies is that it has been absorbed by normative Judaism and Christianity. Of course, I would add that if we have been students of religion for any amount of time at all, ironies of this kind will cease to amaze us -- though perhaps not to amuse.

Secondly, he reverses the adjective. Yahweh is not "anthropomorphic," but the exceptional human characters in the J tradition -- including the great king David who, though he didn't make it into J's text, may have been on the fringes of J's writing, inspiring her (yes, Bloom says, her) work -- are theomorphic. The humans who approximate the greatness of Yahweh's "uncanny" and delightfully "ironic" personality receive this mark of high praise from Bloom, e.g., Rebekah, Jacob, Tamar. (I cannot recommend highly enough Bloom's Book of J and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. Those books inspired me in a way I'm sure Bloom would not have anticipated -- he sticks to literary criticism -- but they've encouraged me to say what others don't often don't and what I've long suspected: there is a real personality difference between Yahweh and God the Father. Give me Yahweh for my money to the vitiated "God the Father" of our pulpits.)

Well, why should Bloom's idea of God factor into religious reflection? Pretty dangerous, if not stupid, don'tcha think, to include literary criticism into the concrete from which is poured one's theological foundation? Maybe, but Christianity as I have come to know it has left me with little choice. A "human-all-too-human" God isn't limited to the J text, I think, though Bloom prefers that strand of literature in the Hebrew Bible to anything else. But the passional nature of God -- like the kind we see in Numbers -- and the sometimes cruel sense of irony that he has -- which we see in, say, Babel -- is given free rein in the rhetoric of the prophets. These men step onto the theater of human events with very real senses of indignation for the shit that people pull. I love Abraham J. Heschel's discussion of this matter in The Prophets. I cannot top his discussion, so I'll just refer you to him, especially since you're getting a kick out of Judaica lately. He tackles this issue of anthropomorphism in an interesting way, too.

I rather like that Mormons say that God is an embodied being. I like that for the same reason that I like Bloom's reading of the J text. If God, he says in another book, is embodied, then he is necessarily conditioned, and as such he is limited and therefore passionate. Only the beatified in the ethereal realms of Nirvana have no complaints. The wheel turns. Fortune spins her wheel, if you will. Those sitting on the hub are not moved, like the Greek's unmoved mover. But, Yahweh is on the wheel, not because he didn't spin it -- he did, according to the Hebrew Bible -- but because he is bound by affection and possessive love to be affected by what human beings do. "He who angers you controls you," might be the bit of pop wisdom we'd hurl at God. God, quite simply, doesn't give a shit. He will be affected. He simply prefers it that way. It doesn't much matter whether you take the "embodied being" literally, as long as you take it seriously.

I remember sitting with a friend at Whitworth University who was studying for her final exam in one of her courses. She was reviewing different kinds of love, like agape and storge and phileo and these others. One was new to me. It was called "mania," that is, the kind of love in which the lover is elated in the presence of his beloved, but wildly dejected when the beloved is absent or has spurned the offered love. "Oh, you mean Yahwistic love," I offered. After a moment, the fellow studying with her said, "Yeah." I don't know how exactly how to reconcile a passionate God with the expanse of the universe. But the Hebrew Bible plainly sets forth that kind of prima facie contradiction: Yahweh is in the heavens, yet he regards the children of Adam. Your email is but one example that the contradiction is one we are rather uncomfortable with.

Is anthropomorphism in the Bible a problem? Sure. But the way is surely not that of Augustine, who said these events of a passionate or ignorant God -- God has to be talked down by Moses or has to "learn" whether the reports he has heard about Sodom's wickedness are true -- are merely instructional fictions for us. God's only putting on a show for our benefit. Like a good Jew, I have to put that in the category of "hogwash." Something perhaps more along the lines of "open theism," though I don't much care for the term itself, might be what I lean to. Again, I take the implications of God's persuadability and his pathos (I might've made that word up, for all I know) seriously.

I am no Christian. (Thank God.) I am a Yahwist. In many respects, my sect of one -- or, if you like, my heresy -- is the mirror image of Marcionism. Marcion wanted the Tanakh thrown out along with all those "Old Testament-like" passages of vengeance in the NT. He kept Paul and some of Luke (I likes me some Prodigal Son story, please). Unlike Marcion, I keep the NT more or less intact, but I use it selectively. But the real, foundational difference is I read the NT in light of the Tanakh, not the "Old Testament" in light of the NT.

"Tanakh" is a Jewish term. "Old Testament" is a Christian term. Harold Bloom said that Christian history has seen the "textual slavery" of the Hebrew Bible. I thought so, too, but he puts it way better than I could, so all that was left for me to do when reading that was to applaud him. I would say that calling the Hebrew Bible or the Tanakh the "Old Testament" is like calling a black person a "nigger" or a woman a "cunt." (You wanna see huge power dynamics embedded in a single term? Consider those three.)

There is an arguably real personality difference between Yahweh and God the Father. As functions of theological discourse, they result in different approaches to prayer, Bible-reading, commentary and, of course, action. I invite you to examine your prayers. How angry are you really allowed to be? How disappointed? Besides the "negative" emotions, what do you do with the "positive" ones? How many of your earthly affections are you continually reminded by your "God" to regard as rivals to his rightful rule? Could Elisabeth Elliot -- or a Christian minister you can think of, for that matter -- ever have written the Song of Solomon? (The answer is "no.") What is the emotional response of your God to your various states of mind? How is he appeased? How easily does he become displeased? How is your sense of guilt and fear of his passional nature diverted or repressed in your appeals to priestly blessings of forgiviness "in the name of Christ"? Are your prayers palliatives, or are they real places of rhetorical engagement with a deity who may or may not be persuaded (cf. Abraham and Yahweh, Gen. 18; Moses and Yahweh, Exodus 32)? Some people believe that "God exists, and he is in control" is proper piety -- for a Christian, maybe. For a Yahwist, that is pagan, abject fatalism.

Compare two translations of the same "verse." Which is Yahwistic, and which Christian?

1. O Lord, by your hand save me from such men, from men of this world whose reward is in this life. --Psalm 17.14, NIV, my emphasis
2. By your hand, [Yahweh], save me from such men, from whose share in this life is fleeting. --ibid. JPS, my emphasis

See the difference? The Christian "translation" reduces wicked people to those who desire the good of this life. The implication is that "heaven" awaits those who trust in God.

Now see the other. Wicked people are those who, in the psalmist's hope, won't enjoy this life for very long but who will not live out the whole of their days. The hope of the just is a longer life. Blessing is, as Bloom poetically says, "more life, into a time without boundaries"; for the Christian, that hope is heaven, and all of this life, and all we hope for in it, is denigrated with theological sanction. (But we still want what this life has: those torn between this theological this-life denigration and yet who desire this earth all the same are, consequently, neurotic. Case in point: Elisabeth Elliot.)

The Tanakh makes no sense if you are a Christian hoping for heaven. Heaven may exist, but for a Yahwist (such as myself), it is icing on the cake. What we Yahwists desire is the Blessing, that which Jacob fought God for, and which he won. It may not work out the way we desire -- reasons for which Job and Ecclesiastes were written -- but we hope all the same. Notice how the NT rewrites the blessing of Abraham into "Christ" in Galatians; what Abraham wanted in a child is transformed into something completely different, all through turning the Bible into a legal will and reading it with an unbending literalism ("seed," as any Tanakh-reading Jew would know, meant "descendants" -- plural). Paul should be tarred and feathered for this carelessness with scripture, no matter what passes for sound hermeneutics in those times. Hang your midrashes and typological readings. It is no wonder many people who actually knew what the Bible said didn't listen to him. I don't know if I would were he to speak with me.

A Christian Pragmatist's Argument for Prayer

William James, American psychologist and philosopher, was of the opinion -- if I may borrow the language of the New Testament -- that if a philosophy shall do no work, it shall not eat (cf. 1 Thessalonians 3.10). That to me captures the essence of pragmatism as explained by James in his (imaginatively titled) Pragmatism. To quote James, "Theories [...] become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don't lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work. Being nothing essentially new, it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies. It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical abstractions. [...] It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method" (italics in original).

Pragmatism's "method" lends itself to all kinds of philosophical positions. Liberals and conservatives alike can be of the pragmatic cast of mind, so long as they always return to the basic "pragmatic question": What difference does it make? In putting this question before his audience of Harvard-educated philosophers, James reminds them and us that many of our philosophical questions, in the end, are of little practical consequence. During the days of the scholastics, it was a serious question as to how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. While much has been made of this now -- to us -- patently silly question, it's not a far cry from many other questions that have been raised by people enamored of finding out the nature of the Absolute. Theologians often go scurrying about in their Bibles and their Augustine and Plato to make an argument for the incontrovertible truths of the nature of God. This kind of thing can be disheartening. In Doctrine and Covenants, Latter-day Saints founder Joseph Smith bemoaned the plurality of doctrines he heard in his time given by ministers who "understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible." Another mystic and visionary, William Blake, wrote the witticism "Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read'st black where I read white." It is in just this sort of demoralizing, endless controversy where pragmatism can be of most use.

Pragmatism, writes James, is decidedly "anti-intellectual"; that is, it does not wish to spend its time intellectualizing matters of which we can have no certainty. In the end, pragmatism is about results, not upholding doctrinal systems. It begins with the question, as Richard Rorty said, of what we wish to do. Applied to the Christian religion, the comments of Smith and Blake (and odd combination, I know) may point us to a more philosophically and theologically unencumbered approach to faith. While I am neither Mormon nor mystic, I do appreciate from experience the dead ends one faces when it comes to arguing for theological doctrines by going to the Bible. One finds that when Christians of the liberal wing would argue for their positions biblically, they must spend a lot of time debunking the "inerrancy" of the Bible, followed by a history lesson, often from the 19th century on, concerning Darwin's work on the HMS Beagle, the German "higher critics," and the evils of fundamentalism on into the 20th century (e.g., Prohibition, the Scopes Monkey Trial). On the other hand, those apologizing for the inerrant position must spend a great deal of time with textual citation from the Bible in which the anthology comments on itself regarding its authoritative status. While I am partial to one side over the other, I am now far enough removed from the controversy to have begun tiring of it, seeing that both sides have rarely said anything new in the last twenty years. Where the "anti-intellectual" impatience of pragmatism comes in is when arguments have become tired, ineffective, and nothing more than drawing "Amens" from the choirs in each converted wing.

My former English professor Cleatus Rattan once said in my class that "Christians have far more to unite them than to divide them." I think he's right, but there are two issues that Christians will have to learn to get over before any broad reconciliation across denominational lines can begin: abortion and homosexuality. Both topics are hot buttons, and, interestingly enough, the Bible has very little to say about either. Biblical references to the former are nil, and those to the latter are so riddled with problems that they almost aren't worth looking at except for personal educational reasons. Liberal Chrisitans, in their efforts to simplify the issues, retreat to Jesus's summation of the Torah: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength; and your neighbor as yourself." Christians from the conservative wing readily respond with, "yes," but are quick to qualify their answer by saying that love involves many particulars: namely, clearly defined categories of righteousness and sin, and love for the world necessarily involves, for them, a proliferation of discourse itemizing certain sins -- homosexuality among them -- and remedies for them. Liberal Christians have, as is well known to any who follows Christian goings-on in this country, would rather not deal with that issue at all except to welcome homosexuals into their communities, and would instead prefer to focus their energies on relief for the poor. Anyone can agree that the poor are to be helped.

As I write this, I begin to sense anew the same kind of hopelessness that Joseph Smith and William Blake felt: these two issues, as much political as theological -- if not more so -- hardly show any sign of being left alone by Christian ministers. Paul himself knew there were such things as fruitless questions, and he decided, pragmatically enough, to dispense with them, and with the schismatics who insisted on bringing them up. Before you respond, as I'm inclined to do, with "Wait just a minute, Paul, we can't just throw out people because they disagree with us", keep in mind that there's nothing like theological controversy to split friends. More important for Paul than debate was koinonoia, what we call "fellowship" but which would more literally be translated "common-mindedness." I doubt, of course, that Paul was counseling doctrinal purity on every point. Surely he must have realized that to be impossible. Rather, I think the more pragmatic view would be to say that Christians should be of the "same mind" in maintaining fellowship in the body. We are present to encourage each other through life and life's problems, not to be divisive through unbending insistence that one doctrine carry the day in our respective fellowships. Primary is seeing to it that people are spiritually and socially integrated. If those two things involve allowing for lively debate, then so be it. If, however, debate becomes inimical to that primary goal, we had best do away with it -- for the time being at least -- and allow for it in some other sphere.

I am all for inciting new theological discourse; I believe that a free circulation of ideas is good for stimulating the intellect and for driving us to prayer. It's a tired saying, but the more we know, the more we know that we don't know; this has to be salutary in that it would encourage one to seek spiritual consolation in prayer. A prayerless community is all the more likely, it seems, to forget its primary purpose of creating a community "in Christ," a Christ, as Paul emphasized, was not "divided."

The weight of questions can be a great one, and a burdensome one. But many of us are simply driven to question, and for our own spiritual and intellectual health we need community in which questions are welcomed and encouraged. But beyond this weight of questions is the weight of glory; for me, a person who has found talking about the Bible to be both a joy and a burden, the practical lesson to be learned is that final answers are elusive. This does not mean I shall not seek them -- the eternity in the heart to find out what God has made is certainly there -- but I now look at this frustration as an instrument of the Parakletos, as God's own counsel that I should let peace guide my quest(ions), that it should be a companion. This way, I may still use my gift of eternity-in-the-heart not to frustrate me or others, but to point them toward the shalom of God.

This afternoon I had a discussion with my friend Hank; he and I both have the Platonist in us, that there must be, certainly, a Truth (with a capital "T"). We also believe that we cannot know it rationally; it's rather a trans-rational, intuited, quasi-emotive thing (I won't grasp for a better term to illustrate what I mean). I know now to welcome the frustration of the intellect only because it has been both joyous and frustrating all at once, and never delivering all the goods it aspires toward. When it promises to deliver, it lies; but when it admits it cannot, it does me good -- it makes me sue for deliverance from another Source. Prayer may not seem like a very pragmatic thing to do -- how utilitarian is that, really? But, for a Christian, prayer must be efficacious -- this is assumed as any self-evident truth is in Euclidean geometry. It must minister to the pray-er, as well as to the Pray-ee. If prayer really is about cultivating a relationship with God -- a term I do not like for its personal connotations, but I think I begin to sense its true meaning -- then this must be ultimately utilitarian. If I may trust that a ever-increasingly stronger sense of God's presence will make me both more at peace and more useful to those around me, then I neglect prayer at my own peril as well as that of others.

To conclude then:

1. The proliferation of questions and promoting them can encourage the irreligious to open their minds once again to God;
2. My personal frustration with discursive thought about God comes with its own powerfully pathetic appeal: "pray, for your own good";
3. The intellectual and the spiritual may both be satisfied -- the former enjoys a satisfaction-dissatisfaction; the latter enjoys the integration of all things under the auspices of God. I.e., let us hope to God it all means something to him and to us.
   

Hedged About?: Christian Parenting Meets the Book of Job

Convinced as I am that the evangelical social and discursive apparatus exists, not so much to facilitate the worship of God, but to preserve a certain way of life, my opinions on biblical interpretation often meet with sanction from those closest to me, who hail from evangelical roots. Surprisingly, though, my father has learned to accept me and the way I view the Bible, primarily because -- to use rhetorical terms for it -- I have established a strong ethos with him: I am sincere about my religious faith, and I have, more than he (or anyone else he knows) has, studied the Bible with great, almost compulsive intensity. Just a couple weekends ago, a conversation with him and my step-mother came to the issue of the so-called Virgin Birth prophecy of Isaiah, and I argued -- as cogently as I could -- that Matthew was at best a bungler with the texts of the Hebrew prophets, or he was cynically disingenuous at worst. Believing the best about poor Matthew, I lean toward the former opinion, though outright textual charlatanry is by no means absent from religious history, Christianity not excepted. My step-mother could not argue with my opinion, and she sidestepped the issue by counseling that I "step away" from the Bible to pray for faith. This form of "argument" has many permutations in Christian discourse, and it is actually the central form of persuasion in that quirky offshoot of American Protestantism, Mormonism. At bottom, Joseph Smith seemed to know that what he was writing/inventing was incredible, and so he advises at the end of the Book of Mormon: "And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost" (Moroni 10.4). The use of pathetic appeals -- that is, creating a strong, persuasive feeling -- and not of logical appeals, is the modus operandi of much institutional faith.

That said, while driving from Dublin to Eastland a couple weekends ago, I once again the radio to KCBI, one of the airwave colonies of the Criswellite (perhaps "Criswellian" is a better term?) empire. Staunchly Baptist in its commitment, it dedicates its efforts to shoring up the faithful against the onslaughts of the liberal media, popular culture, and other evils that threaten to draw away the most precious social capital of the evangelical Right -- namely, its children.

The radio call-in show featured a distraught middle-aged woman who was anxious over the "rebellion" of her high school-aged son. Apparently, her confessed "hovering" over him was having an effect opposite of the one intended, and the son was hanging out with friends his mother would rather not have around him -- and his church attendance was faltering. When confronted by expressed concerns from his parents, the child made protests of "wanting to be good" (i.e., to please his parents), a sign that his parents' religious socialization project had worked to some degree, and that his forays into prodigality were creating in him a kind of cognitive dissonance. Still, the woman felt she was losing the battle for his soul, and the counselor gave a most interesting (read, appalling) exegesis while speaking ex radio.

The on-air counselor (his credentials are unknown to me, but he seems on par with most so-called Christian counselors) advised that the mother pray for a "hedge of protection" around her son. He then went on to cite Job 1.10 as the "scriptural basis" for this prayer. While this son continues to rebel, said the counselor, pray that God would place his protection around your son so he does not damage himself irreparably.

I needed to hear nothing further. After a few swear words, I took the moment to think about what I had just witnessed in this pallid Scripture-citing masquerading as Christian counseling. Taking as I do a primarily literary approach to the Bible and only secondarily a religious one (if it were the other way around, I wouldn't be thinking this stuff, much less writing it), this citation was unacceptable. My former professor, Dr. Cleatus Rattan, is fond of saying (and saying rightly) that teachers of literature exist in part to show which interpretations of literary works are possible, and which impossible. What this man was doing was impossible.

In the words of Hamlet, "I will tell you why." The first chapters of the Book of Job comprise what we might call a frame story for the three lengthy rhetorical cycles that form the majority of the work. Halfway convinced that Job may in fact be an example of ancient Hebrew drama -- the "stage action" of the servants running in one after the other to tell Job of the serial calamities that have befallen him strikes me as almost Sophoclean, in that what horrendous things occur are merely described to us by minor characters entering on cue -- I'm prone to see this work as one of the greatest literary examples in the anthology we call the Bible, and I take rather seriously what every character says. Most of all, I take very seriously what the Accusing Angel has to say.

The Accusing Angel is grossly misunderstood by modern evangelical "readers" of the Bible. Because the appellation for this character in the Hebrew is ha' satan -- the Adversary -- evangelicals believe that this character is the Christian Devil. This, too, is impossible. The kind of dualism that we witness in the pages of the Christian New Testament is totally alien to the Hebrew Bible, where Yahweh -- not "Satan" -- takes full responsibility for both calamity and comfort. Also convinced that most theological rationales are first social, I see, following Elaine Pagels, that the "Devil" or "Satan" of the New Testament is more a symbolic stand-in for the enemies of the inchoate Christian faith, especially in the case of the quondam friends of the first, Jewish Christians, "the Jews" (John, ad passim). Things being what they are, "Satan" is a literally accurate, but misleading, translation of this character's name. Because ha 'satan denotes "the adversary," ad because the function of this adversary is to take a cynical and therefore accusatory stance towards Yahweh's humans -- especially those who worship Yahweh -- I opt for the Accusing Angel.

This isn't far fetched. It's very clear that this angel is one of the "sons of El" who are quite welcome members of Yahweh's heavenly retinue. If Yahweh were Zeus, we might make a Hermes of the Accusing Angel, especially because this angel is about the business of running reconnaissance errands for Yahweh. It's the job (the bad pun not entirely unintended) of this Angel to get a feel for the real motives of human beings, to find what makes them "tick," if you will. Because the Accusing Angel clearly has more direct involvement with human beings than Yahweh does -- and certainly this is so in Job's case -- his attitude is nothing if not distrustful of humans. He comes off as a cynic because he is; Yahweh, being a deity of both limited intelligence (that is, information) and of some remove from human affairs, knows only by report that Job is among the more outstanding of his worshipers. When Yahweh and the Accusing Angel hold a conversation about Job, Yahweh regurgitates what second-hand information has come before him in the comfort of his court: "Did you pay any attention to my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth: a sound and honest man who fears God and shuns evil" (1.8, NJB).

The Accusing Angel, knowing far more about human beings than Yahweh does, responds with incredulity: "Yes, but does Job fear God for nothing? Haven't you placed a hedge about him, his house, and his whole domain? You've blessed all he undertakes, and his flocks throng the countryside. But stretch out your hand and lay a finger on his possessions: then, I warrant you, he will curse you to your face" (1.9-11, NJB). Yahweh is intrigued, perhaps amused, by the Accusing Angel's cynicism. (And he is, perhaps, even a bit shaken that even the best of his "servants" could be, at bottom, so self-serving.) He accepts the Accusing Angel's challenge as a friendly wager, and so Job's legendary suffering begins.

The "hedge of protection" of Job 1 is certainly not something one is to pray for, certainly not if Yahweh (that's "God" to the evangelical know-nothings out there) may be so easily persuaded to remove it from one on a whim. More than that, how this phrase may be removed from its literary and dramatic context to legitimate the God-sanctioned life of protection (or comfort) is beyond me, unless it truly be that the evangelical enterprise is a self-serving one, as I am inclined to think it is. I said at the beginning that evangelicals exist not to worship God so much as to preserve their way of life. The evidence for that abounds in their biblical interpretations, this spot from a radio show being a case in point.

I find my own cynicism to be much akin to the Accusing Angel's. But, comforted as I am that Yahweh is on such familiar and intimate terms with this now-vilified (because much-misunderstood) member of his retinue, I continue to look at human beings, and most certainly at evangelicals in positions of speaking-subjects, through the eye of "Satan." It is a thankless job, but, then again, the Accusing Angel did win the bet. Job did indeed crumble, and accusations at God flowed from his mouth. I am only waiting for the next evangelical, with familial and social hedge removed, who will maintain a selfless dedication to God at first ("blessed be the name of the Lord") and then falter. Then I will say to such a one, "Welcome to being human."