God Questions His Creation:Genesis 4:1-2 (b)

See:  God Questions His Creation: Genesis 4:1-2 (a)

4:1 Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD.” 2 And again, she bore his brother Abel.

Adam’s role as parent/father is also never described, nor is any conversation or even interaction between Adam and Eve or Adam and his children described.  Fatherhood seems to imply only providing the sperm.  Despite Adam’s role in the fall of humanity, he is mentioned as fathering other children, and his death is recorded, unlike Eve’s whose death was unmemorable.  His name does appear in the ancestry of Christ the Lord in Luke’s Gospel (3:38).  Adam in the New Testament is seen as the prototype of all humans with Christ being the New Adam (Romans 5).  Adam’s role as the first human and first male is noted in the New Testament, and his name is not repudiated though he sinned against God as Eve had done.

“I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD.”  For the first time in the Biblical story Eve has a role in bringing forth life.  Adam had been used by God to bring Eve into existence.  Now Eve sees God helping her to bring forth life.   The woman who Adam had called “the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20) had so far only brought death into the world.  Now she lives up to her name.  

It is interesting that Eve alone has something to say about the first human birth.  Adam says nothing, and seems to have been nothing more than the sperm donor for the baby.  In Genesis 3:16, in what some consider to be the proto-evangel (the first prophecy of the good news of Christ) God foresaw the seed of woman as engaging in a continual warfare with the serpent’s descendents.  That the story places this battle through the seed of woman and does not mention the male in this salvation warfare is unusual in an otherwise male dominated story.     Eve’s punishment is linked to childbirth in Genesis 3, but Adam’s punishment is not linked to fathering but only to farming and mortality.  In Genesis 3:23, God expels Adam from Paradise so that Adam will not be able to live forever.  Adam is neither able to keep himself alive, nor will he be able to propagate the human race without a woman.  But in the story God does not overly link Adam with the continuation of the human race, nor in Genesis 4 does Adam have any say about the process.   For as much as we play up that we all are descendents of Adam, Eve is the more significant personage in the story of the continuation of the human race after the Fall as recorded in Genesis.

“…gotten a man with the help of the LORD.”  The English translation adds a bit to the original text.  Eve only says she has gotten a man with God (or through God) – “with the help of” is not in the text.   Eve really is saying it was she and God who did this.  Is Eve still thinking about the serpent’s promise “to be like God” –even if she didn’t achieve that status through eating the forbidden fruit, maybe she can pass that trait along to her offspring by claiming they are God’s children?   Eve ignores Adam’s role in procreation.

Eve was created to be the man’s helper; Here she credits and praises God for being her helper in procreation.   Being a helper is obviously not a denigrating position and certainly would not suggest the helper’s subservience as some want to read into Genesis 2.  Note also that Eve credits her pregnancy and giving birth to divine help, not to Adam’s virility.   She is crediting the continuation of the human race to God and herself.         Does she in some prophetic way foreshadow the Virgin birth?     Certainly if we look back to Genesis 2 we see that Eve was created by God from Adam. God used Adam to create Eve.   Now Eve is saying she and God are responsible for the next generation of humans even though the text clearly says the child resulted from Adam “knowing” Eve.  Does she not want to credit her husband with the child?  Adam says nothing to defend his masculinity.  Was there a war between the sexes ever since the Fall?  Or is it that Eve intuits that the procreative process in bringing into existence new life imitates the Creator?   Is procreation one way in which we are in God’s image?   Is it the moment in which humans are most like their Creator?  Certainly in the Psalms God is credited with forming the baby in the womb:  “For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13) and also with bringing the child forth from the mother’s womb (Psalm 71:6).   The mother has an experience of God that no father can ever have – God knitting the child in her womb, and bringing forth new life from her body.

Next:   God Questions His Creation: Genesis 4:1-2 (c)

Scripture is Not the Text, but the Reading by God’s People

This is the 7^th blog in this series which began with A Quest to Know What It Means to be Human, and the immediately preceding blog is Florovsky: The Church, the New Testament, & Christ.  In this blog and the next, I am looking at the writings of Fr. Georges Florovsky on the meaning of revelation, Scriptures, the Church and Tradition, as well as the relationship of these terms to each other.   The quotes from Fr. Florovsky come either from his book BIBLE, CHURCH, TRADITION: AN EASTERN ORTHODOX VIEW (from now on referred to as BCT:AEOV) or from his article “The Work of the Holy Spirit in Revelation”, THE CHRISTIAN EAST, Vol  XIII, No. 2 (1932) (referred to as TWHSIR). 

The Christian and Jewish Scriptures are written within human history by humans and for humans. 

“Scripture is a God-inspired scheme or image (eikon) of truth, but not truth itself.” (BCT:AEOV,   p 48)

Sts. Peter & Paul

The Scriptures did not exist before God created humans; they were not written from all eternity before the world existed (that is what some claim of the Q’uran – there is an eternal copy somehow existing in the divine eternity with the earthly ones being merely copies of the eternal one).  The history of mankind was not pre-written by God before anything existed – a divine script in which humans are mere automatons, reading their lines of the script and acting according to the direction already determined by the Author and Director, God.   Christians clearly believe in human free will – the Scriptures record from a human point of view but inspired by God the interaction between God and His creatures.

“God speaks to man through His Spirit; and only in the measure in which man abides in the Spirit does he hear and understand this voice…”  (TWHSIR)

The story of creation in Genesis 1-3 was written after the fact, not before.  Only long after the creation came into existence was the narrative of the Creation story created and then written down.  The story itself was conceived for humans, as revelation, so that humans could understand their origins, so humans could understand their role in creation, and to know their Creator.  The creation accounts in Genesis were not written before the events happened, nor even as the events happened, but only much later when there were people to write them down and they were written for humanity, not for God.   The creation accounts of Genesis 1-2 obviously weren’t written from all eternity, for they describe the existence of the world only once time existed and had elapsed.  The only eternal Word is Jesus, Son of God, who became incarnate for the salvation of the world.

“At any rate the Scriptures demand that they should be expounded and explained. … When the Church expounds Scripture it bears witness to that of which the Scriptures testify. … man is called not only to receive Truth attentively, but also to witness to it. … God’s Word must become evident in the reality of human thought.”  (TWHSIR)

Humans are the apex of the creation story, its goal and crescendo.  Scriptures were written after humans existed to record for posterity and to bring to all generations the revelation God.  The Scriptures require not only humans inspired by God to record them, but also humans inspired by God’s Spirit to read and interpret them.

“St. Hilary put it emphatically… Scripture is not in the reading, but in the understanding…” (BCT:AEOV,  p 17)

So what is necessary for all believers is not simply to possess the text of the Bible, but to hear the text with the community of believers and within the people of God in order to come to the proper understanding.  The Bible was not written with individualism in mind, and the interpretation of Scripture is not done by any one person alone. 

“First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God”   (2 Peter 1:20-21)

For St. Irenaeus,

“’Tradition’ was…a living tradition… entrusted to the Church as a new breath of life, just as breath was bestowed upon the first man.   …. Scripture without interpretation is not Scripture at all; the moment it is used and becomes alive it is always interpreted Scripture.”  (BCT:AEOV,  p80)

Scripture alone is not sufficient for salvation because by itself it remains a text, consider the words of St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:2-8 (NRSV):

“You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.  … our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.   Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory … how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory?”

Note St. Paul’s downplaying of the written word/scriptures.  It is the people of the church at Corinth who are really his scriptures, written not with ink but with the Spirit, not on tablets of stone but on human hearts.  The real scriptures are a living personal witness.   God has chosen disciples to be ministers of a new covenant, but again not of written letters/scripture, but of the spirit – the scripture kills!   And finally the 10 Commandments written by God on stone are called the “ministry of death”!  The written word alone is not sufficient for salvation in the mind of St. Paul the Apostle to the nations.

. Next:  A Few Final Thoughts form Florovsky

Charity: Giving Without Measure

  Fasting and self denial are not the goals of the Christian life – rather they are disciplines to help us attain the goal of loving God and loving the neighbor.  Great Lent is a time for us to practice self denial in order to give more time and energy to loving the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters. 

A story from the desert fathers about charity: 

“An old monk became known for his generosity to the needy.  A widow came to him demanding some wheat from him.  He told her to bring a container and he would give her some.  She came back with a container, and suddenly in front of the others who also were hoping for charity, the monk began to berate the woman saying, ‘This container is too large, just who do you think you are?’  The woman was very embarrassed and quickly left.  Another monk who observed this asked the old monk, ‘Were you selling the wheat to the widow?’  The old man replied, ‘No, I gave it to her in charity.’  The other monk rebuked the old man, ‘If you gave the wheat to her in charity, why did you treat her so harshly, measure so carefully how much you were giving her, and embarrass her so?”

Luke 6:35 -  “lend, expecting nothing in return”

Luke 6:38 -  ”give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

1 Corinthians 13:4-6  -  “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful”

God Questions His Creation: Genesis 4:1-2 (a)

See:  God Questions His Creation: Genesis 4

4:1 Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD.” 2 And again, she bore his brother Abel.  

“Adam knew Eve his wife…”    “Knew”… a Biblical euphemism for “had sexual intercourse.”  The very first thing the humans do after being expelled from Paradise is have sex which might give testimony to the strength of this drive in humans.   Were they afraid their “kind” might go extinct as a result of God’s death-threat punishment of them and so felt the need to procreate immediately?

In Genesis 3:16, God imposes the following consequence on Eve for her sinfully disobeying His command: “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”   But in the immediate aftermath of her and Adam’s expulsion from Paradise, there is no indication that any of the punishment is enforced – no pain in childbirth is reported, Eve shows no desire for Adam (credits the baby to the Lord!), and there is no report that he ruled over her in any sense of the word.  Eve speaks, Adam is speechless.  There may be a feud between Eve and Adam.  Eve credits both the birth of Cain and Seth to God (4:1, 4:25).  In Adam’s genealogy (5:3), Seth is said to be in Adam’s likeness and neither Eve nor God are mentioned in relationship to Seth’s birth.

 Adam was made from the dust of the earth, Eve from the rib of Adam, and now Cain from the sexual union of Adam and Eve.  Cain is the first human not directly created by God but born of the flesh and of human will.  Our Lord Jesus Christ alters this process and transforms the children of sexual procreation once again into children of God.  “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13). Christ restores in us through adoption that childhood born of God which belonged to Eve and Adam naturally from the beginning. The begetting of children which Christ inaugurates is also not sexual procreation, but is being born again of water, the Spirit, and of the faith of the one being born.

Cain is the first human conceived by sexual union and born of a woman.   In some sense all humans are more like Cain than we are like Adam who had no human parents.  And though in the Scriptures the first born male child will be special to the Lord (Thus says the Lord, “Consecrate to me all the first-born; whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine.”  Exodus 13:2), not so of the first human conceived and brought to life by the first human parents.   Our lineage is not traced through Cain but through the 3^rd born son, Seth.  The line of the first-born Cain will be wiped out according to the story of the great flood.   Is this a harbinger of the bad fruits humanity seems to produce?  Not only will our hearts be continually inclined toward evil (Genesis 6:5), so will the fruit we produce – our offspring?!?   The first born and the first fruits are normally special in God’s eyes, but not so of the first born son of a sexual union.

“Adam knew Eve his wife…”    There is no indication in the text that the first humans actually had sexual intercourse or even sexual feelings while in Paradise.  The scripture’s silence on the issue led to the Patristic conclusion that Paradise was a sexless state of existence for the humans and that virginity was thus the normative and natural state for humans.  The fact that the Theotokos Mary conceives as a virgin – conception without sex – was viewed by some Patristic writers as the fulfillment of God’s original intention.  Mary’s ability to procreate without sex was interpreted to prove sex is not essential to being human.  Sexual relations from this point of view belong to the fallen world and to the Old Covenant.  They are interpreted as a concession by a loving God so that the human race doesn’t become extinct.  With the New Covenant in Christ and with the resurrection of the dead, procreation itself becomes unnecessary, and thus sex no longer has a role in salvation but is seen as purely recreational, superfluous and unspiritual.   The resurrection brings humans to life – without sex.

Eve – this is the last mention of Eve by name in Genesis or anywhere in the Old Testament.  She will be mentioned in Genesis 4:25 when Seth is born but only as “Adam’s wife.”  Besides giving birth, no parental/motherly role is ascribed to Eve in Genesis.  Before she gives birth to any children Adam calls her “the mother of all living” (Gen 3:20) but this seems to mean only that she gives birth and is not a description of her role as parent.  No interaction or dialogue is described between Eve and her children and motherhood seems mostly to consist of childbearing.   Eve is also referenced in the Septuagint prayer of Tobit as he asks God to bless his own union with his wife.  The only use of Eve’s name in the New Testament occurs in the writings of St. Paul who connects Eve to the first disobedience of God’s commands, to sin and the fall of humankind.  Eve is nowhere in the Bible connected to any positive qualities or characteristics.  In post-apostolic Christianity, the Virgin Mary will be called the “new” Eve, but this refers not to Eve’s virtues but to Mary as the one who replaces/corrects/heals the first Eve.  Eve who is the only other human in the Bible described as being directly created by God rather than coming from human birth seems to have no positive role to play at all.  She was created by God to correct what was “not good” in His original creation, but the story indicates she made things a whole lot worse for creation, for humans, for God!    In the Muslim Quran which appears in the 7^th Century AD there are similar creation stories as appear in Genesis.  However Eve is never mentioned by name in the Quran – her existence is implicit only.  Eve, the first woman, created directly by God according to Genesis 2, is virtually excluded as having any positive role in the history of humankind.

Next:  God Questions His Creation: Genesis 4:1-2 (b)

The Last Judgment: God Peering into My Heart

Sunday of the Last Judgment 2010         Matthew 25:31-46

 

John 13:34

“God is truth and light.  God’s judgment is nothing else than our coming into contact with truth and light.  In the day of the Great Judgment all men will appear naked before this penetrating light of truth.  The ‘books’ will be opened.  What are these ‘books’?  They are our hearts.  Our hearts will be opened by the penetrating light of God, and what is in these hearts will be revealed.  If in those hearts there is love for God, those hearts will rejoice in seeing God’s light.  If, on the contrary, there is hatred for God in those hearts, these men will suffer by receiving on their opened hearts this penetrating light of truth which they detested all their life.

 

So that which will differentiate between one man and another will not be a decision of God, a reward or a punishment from Him, but that which was in each one’s heart; what was there during all our life will be revealed in the Day of Judgment.  If there is a reward and a punishment in this revelation – and there really is – it does not come from God but from the love or hate which reigns in our heart.  Love has bliss in it, hatred has despair, bitterness, grief, affliction, wickedness, agitation, confusion, darkness, and all the other interior conditions which compose hell (1 Cor 4:6).   ….  In the future life the Christian is not examined if he has renounced the whole world for Christ’s love, or if he has distributed his riches to the poor or if he fasted or kept vigil or prayed, or if he wept and lamented for his sins, or if he has done any other good in this life, but he is examined attentively if he has any similitude with Christ, as a son does with his father. (St. Symeon the New Theologian).”  (Dr. Alexandre Kalomiros, “The River of Fire”)

Florovsky: The Church, the New Testament & Christ

This is the 6^th blog in this series which began with A Quest to Know What It Means to be Human, and the immediately preceding blog is Florovsky: Scripture and the Church.  In this blog and the next, I am looking at the writings of Fr. Georges Florovsky on the meaning of revelation, Scriptures, the Church and Tradition, as well as the relationship of these terms to each other.   The quotes from Fr. Florovsky come either from his book BIBLE, CHURCH, TRADITION: AN EASTERN ORTHODOX VIEW (from now on referred to as BCT:AEOV) or from his article “The Work of the Holy Spirit in Revelation”, THE CHRISTIAN EAST, Vol  XIII, No. 2 (1932) (referred to as TWHSIR). 

The Nativity in the flesh of Jesus, Son of God

Prior to the coming of Christ – the incarnation of God the Word – the Scriptures had a particular role to play and were to be read and appreciated as the continued work of God’s Spirit/breath in the life of God’s people.  With the arrival of the Messiah Jesus, the Scriptures have been fulfilled and they are shown to be a witness to Jesus, pointing Him out as God’s plan of salvation (see Simeon’s prayer in Luke 2:29-32 and also Christ’s own words in John 5:39-40).

“Jesus … is the fulfiller of the old dispensation and by the same act that he fulfills the old, ‘the Law and the prophets,’ he inaugurates the new, and thereby becomes the ultimate fulfiller of both, i.e. of the whole.  He is the very centre of the Bible, just because he is the arche and the telos—the beginning and the end. … the Old Testament as a whole has to be considered as a ‘book of the generations of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham (Matt 1:1).  … The whole story was prophetical or ‘typical,’ a prophetical sign hinting forward towards approaching consummation.  Now, the time of expectation is over.  The promise has been accomplished. … the history of flesh and blood is closed.  The history of the Spirit is disclosed.  …  the books of the Hebrews…are to be read in the Church as a book of sacred history, not to be transformed into a collection of proof-texts or of theological instances…, nor into a book of parables…. In sacred history, ‘the past’ does not mean simply ‘passed’ or ‘what had been,’ but primarily that which had been accomplished and fulfilled.  “Fulfilment’ is the basic category of revelation.  … it is precisely in the Old Testament that we apprehend revelation primarily as the Word: we witness to the Spirit that ‘spake through the prophets.’  For in the New Testament God has spoken by his Son, and we are called upon not only to listen, but to look at.”  (BCT:AEOV,  pp 22-24)

 “The New Testament is also, first of all, history—the Gospel history of the incarnated Word and of the beginning of the history of the Church. . . The basis of the New Testament is facts, events, realities; not only commandments, teaching, and words.  Here the basis is Christ and the Church, His Body. . . . Therein lies the meaning and importance of apostolic preaching that it is a narrative, a narrative of what the Apostles themselves heard and saw, of what was fulfilled and accomplished. . . ‘Which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled’ (1 John 1:1).”  (TWHSIR)

As the Old Testament bore witness to the coming of the Messiah, so the New Testament bears the witness of those who saw, spoke with and touched Christ.  The importance of the text is by giving us the history which His witnesses and disciples recorded, it offers to us the revelation which God made known to the world in Jesus Christ.

“Divine Revelation is preserved in the Church.  It is protected and strengthened by the words of Scripture; it is protected, but not exhausted.  The words of Scripture do not exhaust the whole fullness of Revelation; do not exhaust the whole fullness of Christian experience and of the charismatic reminiscence of the Church.”  (TWHSIR)

St. Paul, Apostle to the Nations

The Scriptures do not exists alone.  They are not something which existed from all eternity and then suddenly God dictated to a few men to record.  The Scriptures contain the human interaction with God as God revealed Himself and the Scriptures are the human co-operation with God in recording and understanding this revelation.  The Scriptures thus exist in and are produced by and for the people of God.  The preservation of God’s revelation is accomplished by the faithful.  The Bible’s truthfulness is testified to by the people of God, and for any to know God’s revelation they need both the Scriptures and the Church, the people to whom God entrusted His revelation.  Christ did not leave a book behind for the world to read, rather He chose apostles to bear witness to Him as truth, and the apostles were inspired to write, edit and chose which books belong to the Scriptures of God’s people.

“And the Church is the divinely appointed and permanent witness to the very truth and the full meaning of this message, simply because the Church belongs itself to the revelation, as the Body of the Incarnate Lord. … Salvation is not only announced or proclaimed in the Church, but precisely enacted. … The Church is itself an integral part of the New Testament message.  The Church itself is a part of revelation—the story of ‘the Whole Christ’…” (BCT:AEOV,  p 26)    

Christians (=the Church) bear witness to the truth of the Scriptures and testify to that truth as is manifested in the life of the Church.

Next:  Scripture is Not the Text, but the Reading by God’s People

Lord, Grant us to Sit at your right hand in Your Glory

Judas betrays Christ with a kiss

A Pre-Lenten meditation on 4 ways of discipleship as described in Mark 14:43-15:1

A)    ”Judas came, one of the twelve, and with him a crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests and the scribes and the elders.  Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, “The one I shall kiss is the man; seize him and lead him away under guard.”  And when he came, he went up to him at once, and said, “Master!” And he kissed him.  And they laid hands on him and seized him” (14:43-46).

Judas was one of the chosen 12 disciples, yet he decides to betray the Master using the kiss of peace as the way to mark Jesus as the condemned man.   Apparently the crowd did not know enough about Jesus even to identify Him if they saw him.  Their willingness to arrest and condemn Him is somewhat irrational – except if one accepts that they were blindly obedient to authority.  Looking for Christ is not sufficient for salvation, nor is finding Him, nor is even greeting Him with a kiss.  So much more is required of a disciple – from the heart, from the depths of one’s being, involving all that you have and do.

B)    But one of those who stood by drew his sword, and struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his ear. And Jesus said to them, “Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me?  Day after day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me. But let the scriptures be fulfilled.”  (14:47-49)

One disciple, who shall remain unnamed, draws his sword to defend with violence His Lord, the King of peace.  Jesus does not praise his action, nor does he join in the fight.  Rather he ignores his followers violence and turns his attention to his opponents exposing their hypocrisy.  Religious leadership which engages in secrecy and stealth and carries out its plans under the cover of darkness has embraced the friends and weapons of Satan.  Jesus wants no part of it either.  He is not going to resist the darkness of evil with violence, nor will he allow the methods of evil to go unexposed.   Jesus’ way is one of martyrdom – to witness to the truth, not to try to kill the messenger.  Jesus does not commend in His disciple that very human tendency to strike back; He does not condone the human tendency to resort to violence  against every perceived threat or evil.

C)    “And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body; and they seized him,  but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked” (14:51-52).

Too often I am unprepared as a disciple for the situation I have walked into by following Christ.  The thin veneer of my faith is quickly stripped away by circumstances and I have to flee naked before power and evil.    This disciple’s embarrassing story, has too often been my own.  I have fled many discussions, controversies, and disagreeable situations because I was unprepared for the spiritual warfare before me.  I may successfully have avoided being wounded but I did so only by fleeing silently while allowing the darkness to overtake the situation.

D)  “Peter had followed him at a distance (Matthew says in his Gospel 26:58, Peter “sat with the guards to see the end”), right into the courtyard of the high priest; and he was sitting with the guards, and warming himself at the fire. . .  And after a little while again the bystanders said to Peter, “Certainly you are one of them; for you are a Galilean.”  But he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, “I do not know this man of whom you speak.” And immediately the cock crowed a second time. And Peter remembered how Jesus had said to him, “Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.” And he broke down and wept” (14:70-72).

The disciple Peter, whom bishops so want to be considered because he is a rock, is afraid to acknowledge his relationship to Jesus, but isn’t afraid to “sit with the guards” who are assuring Jesus’ demise will happen!  Why is it that we are afraid to confess our sins to God who promises to forgive, but have no fear of sitting with those opposing godliness or of watching events unfold with them  and from their godless point of view? 

What regrets Peter will have, even to the point of weeping about what he had done – but only later.  Immediately he doesn’t want to be made uncomfortable by being seen as a friend of the condemned Jesus.  Discipleship means at times having to acknowledge Jesus as Lord even when to do so might be threatening to oneself.  It means at times not putting oneself on the side of those in power, or with peers who seem to have the upper hand, but being willing to identify with the condemned, the powerless, the oppressed, or to stay on the side of righteousness despite the risks and consequences one might have to face.

And what if we fail as disciples?

Then we are in the good company of the Twelve when they were at their worst.  Though this is embarrassing to acknowledge. 

Jesus does restore Peter to his rightful place in the fellowship of Apostles after Peter denied him.    Jesus will come to His disciples and grant them peace and send the Holy Spirit upon them on the day of Pentecost – after they had behaved the way they did on the day of His betrayal and arrest. 

In the end, even these who had denied Him and abandoned Him and fled from Him, are given opportunity to witness to Him on another day.  One of the chosen 12 betrays Jesus and then dies alone having separated himself (excommunicated himself!) from the fellowship of the Twelve.  Ten of the 11 Apostles accept martyrdom eventually holding fast and faithful to Christ.  The 11^th dies in the loneliness of exile far removed from the communion of the disciples.   They learned how hard it is to live for Christ, and what it means to take up the cross and deny one’s self for Him as the way to witness to the Kingdom of God.

“For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit; he who thus serves Christ is acceptable to God . . .” (Romans 14:17-18)

God Questions His Creation: Genesis 4

Expulsion of Adam & Eve from Paradise

See:  God Questions His Creation: Introduction

In the chapter 2 of Genesis God forewarned Adam that if he ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, on that day he would die.  Despite the impending threat of death, Eve took the initiative and the forbidden fruit and ate it, then gave it to the passive Adam who followed her lead and ate the fruit.

As the story unfolded there was not instant death, or even death on that day they ate the fruit.  Eve and Adam’s eyes are opened, as the serpent foretold, but what they see is their own nakedness and so they attempt to cover themselves with leaves and then hide from God.

Still very much alive, Eve and Adam are confronted by God who does not use the threatened capital punishment against them, but rather formulates some other curses involving suffering in childbirth and imposing on them the difficulties we encounter in the world in attempting to raise crops to feed ourselves.  God reconfirms that the humans are now to be mortal beings and will return to the earth from which they were taken – but not yet.

For God puts into play a different plan for the humans, expelling them from His Garden of Paradise, and from His presence.  God puts them into the world to fend for themselves, but he leaves them very much alive.  Later, in Genesis 6:3 God announces that His Breath/Spirit will not abide in humans forever either, for now humans will live only to be 120 years old before death will take them.

Eve and Adam will not die on the day they sinned, nor will they even be the first humans to die, for they will live through the nightmare of every parent – the murder of their son, Abel.  Abel is the first human reported to have died despite the fact that no sin was recorded against him.  Adam goes on to live to be a reported 930 years old before he dies.  Eve vanishes into history as her death is not even recorded.  Adam, however lives far beyond the threatened day of his death, and past the 120 year limit as well.

The story of Genesis puts the biblical literalist to the test in coming up with an explanation to account for the facts of the story.  Some will posit that Eve and Adam suffering some form of “spiritual” death rather than a physical one.  Others understand the story metaphorically or need ideas beyond the text to account for what the text literally says. 

Another possibility is that the story isn’t meant to be read literally.  Perhaps the text is giving us a theological clue as to the nature of this God of love.  God is not governed by karma or pure justice, but is a living personal being who has lordly power even over justice; the Lord can rule in forgiving love.  For instead of immediately striking down Eve and Adam, God is shown to be merciful, to be a God who does not desire the death of a sinner (Ezekiel 18:23, 33:11), not even a sinful one who defiantly sins knowing death is supposed to be the wages for sin (Romans 6:23).

Interestingly, God showed Himself to be merciful to Eve and Adam, clothing them to cover their nakedness rather than killing them (Genesis 3:21), and allowing them to reproduce (though with increased pain in childbirth) to continue the human race rather than allowing them to die into extinction.   God loves His creatures despite their sinful rebellion and provides for them, even though changing His relationship with them and denying them access to the garden He planted for them.  Humans will have to work hard to survive in the world, but God will let them live, something He reaffirms when He repents of having tried to drown the wicked and the wickedness of humans during the Great Flood (see Genesis 8:21 where God vows never again to destroy all of humanity by a flood.  God accepts the fact that humans are ever drawn to sin and always conceive evil in their hearts – He will let them live anyway and work out His plan of salvation despite what the humans might do).

The biblical story of the continuation of the human race once expelled from Paradise, is the story of the merciful God who is love.  Judgment and justice demand God to act against His human creatures; Satan (the Adversary) uses this very logic to incite God against the blessed Job because basically Satan tells God ‘humans are no damn good’ (Job 1:11, 2:4-5).   God remains steadfast in His love for His humans.   Genesis is not the story of the judgment of God on humanity, but of God’s forgiving and merciful love for humankind. There is no mention of hell or eternal punishment in the Genesis account of the Fall.  The vision of God presented in the first chapters of Genesis through and after the sin of Eve and Adam find their culmination in the Gospels:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.  For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him”  (John 3:16-17).

Despite human sinfulness and rebellion, despite humans conceiving evil in their hearts, God shows Himself to be the God of love in allowing the story He began with Adam and Eve to continue.  God shows humans are redeemable, for humanity is able to produce Mary, the Theotokos, who finds favor in God’s eyes.  Through her, God takes on human nature – the Word of God becomes flesh.  God puts his plan for humanity into action in spite of the human proclivity toward sin.

Christ, and the forgiveness He offers by taking upon Himself the sin of the world, is God’s final response to sin and death.   God uses death which humans had brought into the world (Romans 5:12) to destroy death and all evil.

Next:  Genesis 4:1-2

Florovsky: Scripture and the Church

This is the 5^th blog in this series which began with A Quest to Know What It Means to be Human, and the immediately preceding blog is Florovsky: Scripture and Tradition. 

In this and the next 2 blogs, I am looking at the writings of Fr. Georges Florovsky on the meaning of revelation, Scriptures, the Church and Tradition, as well as the relationship of these terms to each other.   The quotes from Fr. Florovsky come either from his book BIBLE, CHURCH, TRADITION: AN EASTERN ORTHODOX VIEW (from now on referred to as BCT:AEOV) or from his article “The Work of the Holy Spirit in Revelation”, THE CHRISTIAN EAST, Vol  XIII, No. 2 (1932) (referred to as TWHSIR).  God creates beings capable of receiving and bearing His revelation – humans.   God creates language as the means to convey revelation to these creatures.  Language too is capable of bearing not only the divine intent but divinity itself.  

 

Matthew 28:20

“The Scriptures transmit and preserve the Word of God precisely in the idiom of man. … What is human is not swept away by divine inspiration, it is only transfigured. The ‘supernatural’ does not destroy what is ‘natural. … Scripture itself is at once both the Word of God and the human response – the Word of God mediated through the faithful response of man.  There is always some human interpretation in any Scriptural presentation of the divine Word.’”     (BCT:AEOV,  pp 27-28) 

When God spoke in Genesis 1, His Divine will created that which was capable of bearing divinity yet was not divinity.  When God said, “let there be light”, there was light.   His spoken word became empirical reality; and this created world was the original theotokos: God bearer.  This is God’s plan: God speaks His Word which calls all things into being; and this creation is capable of bearing divinity.   This creation is not God, yet not separated from God.   The humans are created precisely to carry out God’s will, to bear His Word and to put it into action.   “In Scripture we see not only God, but man as well.”  Humanity is revealed in scripture by God’s revelation.  For the human is exactly to whom God chooses to reveal Himself.    The bodiless powers may to this day be in God’s presence continually, but humans rely on God’s revealing Himself to them, espcially since the time of the Fall.  The humans are the mediators of God’s word and will to the rest of creation, over which they were to have dominion.   

 

Creation of Adam & Eve

“… God reveals Himself to man, appears before him, becomes visible to him, speaks with him, so as to reveal to man the hidden meaning of his existence, to show him the path and meaning of human life.  In Scripture we see God coming to reveal Himself to man, and we see man meeting God and not only listening to His Words, but answering them. … God wants, expects and demands this answer.  It is for this that He speaks with man.  He expects man to answer Him.”    (TWHSIR)

“The Bible is by no means a complete collection of all historical, legislative and devotional writings available, but a selection of some, authorized and authenticated by the use (first of all liturgical) in the community, and finally by the formal authority of the Church.  …  The message is divine; it comes from God; it is the Word of God.  But it is the faithful community that acknowledges the Word spoken and testifies to its truth. … It was the People of the Covenant to whom the Word of God had been entrusted under the old dispensation (Rom 3:2), and it is the Church of the Word Incarnate that keeps the message of the Kingdom.  The Bible is the Word of God indeed, but the book stands by the testimony of the Church.  The canon of the Bible is obviously established and authorized by the Church.”  (BCT:AEOV,  p 18)

“It was not enough just to read and to quote Scriptural words—the true meaning, or intent, of Scripture, taken as an integrated whole, had to be elicited. … it was the faith of the Church, rooted in the apostolic message, or kerygma, and authenticated by it.  … With them (those outside the church) Scripture was just a dead letter, or an array of disconnected passages and stories, which they endeavored to arrange or re-arrange on their own pattern, derived from alien sources.”  (BCT:AEOV,  p 76)  

Possessing the Scriptures (the written word) is not enough for holding the truth.  It is in the meaning/understanding/interpretation of the text – wherein we encounter the mind of Christ.  Literalism is not the key – the words by themselves are not sufficient to come to know truth (false interpretation is possible).  Scriptures are used to proclaim the kerygma, but the kerygma is the interpretation of the Scriptures which is authoritative.  You must have the correct scriptures, but that alone does not guarantee correct kerygma or understanding.  Remember kerygma predates the Scriptures – the apostles proclaimed the Truth many years before they wrote it down.  Thus God’s revelation is to a people, not to a book.  It is the people who recorded and authenticated the written record of God’s revelation.  It is to these people to whom God spoke that He also entrusted they would faithfully and correctly understand, interpret and proclaim the revelation.  Scriptures were never envisioned to be a truth that stands alone apart from God’s people.  The scriptures alone save no one for they must be read, encountered, engaged, interpreted and lived.  Jesus chose disciples to follow Him; He did not write anything, nor did he indicate that simply following some written texts would make holiness or orthodoxy possible.   The texts he said witness to Him (John 5:39-40) and it is to Him that we must go in order to understand the revelation of God.  The written word kills as St. Paul says the Jews discovered, but the Spirit gives life (2 Corinthians 3:6). 

Next:  Florovsky:   The Church, the New Testament & Christ

God Questions His Creation: Introduction (C)

See:  God Questions His Creation: Introduction (B)

St. Clement of Alexandria (d. 211 AD) argued that meaning of scriptures is hidden intentionally so that we are forced to seek out their meaning.  He takes what Jesus says about parables in Mark 4:11-13 (“To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven.”), and applies the teaching of Christ to the entirety of the Bible.  We either are going to be dull and tired of God’s Word, or we are going to work hard to try to understand its meaning even when it is hidden from us.   Theodoret of Cyrus, 5^th Century bishop, acknowledges there is meaning concealed in the text of the scriptures, but he believes it is God Himself who will reveal the meaning of the text to us:

Previous scholars have promised to resolve apparent problems in holy Scripture by explicating the sense of some, indicating the background of others, and, in a word, clarifying whatever remains unclear to ordinary people. …  trusting not in myself, of course, but in the one who dictated this manner of composition for the Scriptures, as it belongs to him to bring to the fore the meaning concealed in the text.  He it was, after all, who in the sacred Gospels presented his teaching in parables and the provided the interpretation of what had been in riddles.  My appeal, therefore, shall be to gain illumination of the mind from him, so I may endeavor to penetrate the innermost sanctuary of the most Holy Spirit.”  (TQOTO, pp 3-5)

St. Jerome (d. 420) in his day, praised the widow Marcella for her persistently inquiring mind when it came to the scriptures:  “…she never came without asking something about Scripture, nor did she immediately accept my explanation as satisfactory, but she proposed questions from the opposite viewpoint, not for the sake of being contentious, but so that by asking, she might learn solutions for points she perceived could be raised in objection.  What virtue I found in her, what cleverness, what holiness…”  (quoted in Hall, RSWTCF).   To approach the scriptures in order to learn, with an inquisitive mind, with difficult questions was once viewed as virtue by the Christian Church and the right way for believers to approach the Scriptures in order to understand them.   To hunger and thirst for a deeper meaning of the scriptures, beyond a superficial or literal reading, was once thought to be normative for Christians and not just the prerogative of the non-believers.  Strange that today if someone asks difficult questions about the Bible we assume they are a nonbeliever!

In writing my reflections, I found the first three chapters of Genesis to be a luscious orchard filled with a super abundance of ripe fruit perfect for meditation.  Each verse blossomed into many ideas each filled with live-giving wisdom and understanding.    Certainly every verse yielded a hundredfold in terms of the number of words in my reflections!   I found Genesis 4-11 to be a garden with much more difficult soil to work, and requiring myself as the husbandman to do a lot more work for a lot less yield.  This may reflect the fact that the earlier chapters of Genesis take us into the Garden of Paradise where God-given fruit abounded, and all that is left to us is to reach out and partake of the sweet fruit.   Genesis 4-11 is life outside of the Garden of Delights.  The soil has become cursed and requires us to till to produce any fruit at all.  Nevertheless, God commanded us to do just this work and to produce the fruit of the ground with thanksgiving and to His glory.   These reflections are the result of those labors – a labor of love.  My hope is that it will bear fruit in your life as well – an ever deeper appreciation for the scriptures, and the joy of searching in God’s garden to find the fruit of hidden treasures.  Questioning is a very appropriate gardener’s tool when working one’s way through Scriptures, and wondrously enough questions are also and often the fruit of the labor of reading the Bible.  

A disclaimer – this is a collection of reflections, it is not a scholarly word study.  I do not read Hebrew or Aramaic, so I don’t comment on the etymology of each word in the text, though that is a valuable way to study the Scriptures.   I do not comment on the meaning of each person’s name, although that too can be helpful in understanding the Scriptures.  Nor have I done a numerological study, even though certain numbers repeat throughout Genesis and obviously have a symbolic value.  Generally such studies can be found in scholarly bible commentaries, dictionaries and encyclopedias (a couple which I have listed in the bibliography).   This work is also not meant to be an Orthodox dogmatic text.  These are simply my reflections on the text.  I’ve included concepts found in the text that disturb me or that I cannot readily explain.   I believe that in reading God’s Word, one way to approach the text is to look for answers.  But a different and very insightful way to approach the text is to discover what questions arise from the text? To what mysteries does it open our minds?  Since it is a revelation from God, what challenges does it present to our very limited and one-sided human thinking?    I embrace St. Basil the Great’s notion that a God who is totally comprehensible is no god at all, but nothing more than the projection of the best of human intellect.  The God whose ways are not our ways, and whose peace is beyond our understanding, is going to have a logic that we are not always going to comprehend.  It is exactly this logic which is at work in the universe and as revealed in the Scriptures – a logic which is beyond our human understanding – which actually led Dostoyevsky to believe a God must exist for how else can we explain the seemingly incomprehensible events of life?

The Lord Jesus said,

“As for what was sown on good soil,

this is he who hears the word and understands it;

he indeed bears fruit, and yields, in one case a hundredfold,

in another sixty, and in another thirty” (Matthew 13:23).

Next:  See God Questions His Creation: Genesis 4