John P. Webster Library First Church of Christ, Congregational, UCC 12 South Main Street West Hartford CT 06107

+Library home +Resources and services +News and events +New materials +Online catalog +Hours and location +Contact us

Online Summer Bible Study, 2004
Week 2 (June 13-19): Genesis 12-24

Throughout Gen 12-24, God "spoke" directly to Abraham (12:1-3, 22, et al) and later to Hagar (21:17-19). Sometimes it was an angel or angel of the Lord who brought messages: to Abram and Sarai, to Hagar, to Lot. How did Abraham, Sarah and Hagar know the "voice" was God's? How do we discern God's voice? For me, there's a hint and prediction in ch. 24, in the activity of Abraham's servant as he seeks a wife for Isaac. The servant prays at the well and even before his prayer is finished, it is answered (he believes) with the appearance of Rebekah. He then goes through a process of discernment, speaking with her, then with her relatives--who affirm his discernment in the context of a "community discussion."

Reflection on these passages has reminded me of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral and how we may "check" our discernment in a variety of ways not available to Abraham's family. I think it's a wonderful gift that we can look to church tradition, our own reason and experience, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit (which may include directly hearing what we believe is God's voice), and scripture, all in the context of the community of Christians. Even when we may not hear God's voice in a loud boom or a silent whisper, God is still speaking.

Peace, Mardie Chapman

missing

Hi David,

Thanks for getting us started!

[Genesis 12
6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 The LORD appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring I will give this land." So he built an altar there to the LORD , who had appeared to him.
http://www.biblegateway.com/cgi-bin/bible?language=english&passage=Genesis+12%3A6-7&version=NIV]

"These are words of subjugation and domination. We can only imagine the suffering these words caused the indigenous Canaanites. We also see these words being applied in the New World centuries later when Europeans used them as the justification for their acts of genocide."

I will be the first to condemn the horrible ways people have used this passage and others related to the idea of a promised land for God's chosen people. However, I am wondering if we can reclaim it and find value and relevance in it today.

Walter Brueggemann observes (An Introduction to the Old Testament, 2003, p.43): "Current scholarship...regards such historical data as doubtful at best, so that we must treat the materials as a product of traditional communal remembering."

With Marcus Borg (Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, 2001, p. 62) I ask: "Why did ancient Israel tell [this] story? And why did they tell [it] this way?"

Brueggemann again (AIttOT, p. 47): "[Abraham] receive[s] little attention in the literature that is commonly dated to the monarchical period of ancient Israel, that is, the 'pre-exilic prophets.' But then, abruptly, the Abraham tradition reemerges in the literature of the exile in a rather spectacular way...the exilic community found in the memory of that promise a ground for hope when the claim of Torah obedience was no longer adequate...Israel would be restored to the land of promise, not because of merit or obedience, but because God is faithful to God's own promise that permeated Israel's life and faith from the outset."

Let us consider some implications of this. First of all, for Christians, this tradition is a strong underpinning of our convictions about the nature of the gospel and its availability to Gentiles as well as Jews. Brueggeman yet again (AIttOT, p. 48): "Paul labels that remarkable promise to Abraham 'the gospel beforehand' (Gal 3:8)."

Second, the tradition--as a forerunner of the Exodus story--is encouragement for any person or group of people "in exile," who see others holding what is rightfully theirs, at their expense. (This is not my original idea, but I'm afraid I don't have a citation at this point). The Canaanites might have the land now, but someday, it will be ours, because God is faithful. A good example of this is the ongoing experience of African Americans in the United States, who have endured slavery and segregation and racism and indifference and other forms of disinheritance at the hands of white "Canaanites." (Hopefully someone will correct me if I have used this example incorrectly).

So, yes, the promise to Abraham contains "words of subjugation and domination"--but also words of support and, ultimately, liberation.

Peace,
Mark Kille
John P. Webster Library

Hi David,

Thanks again!

[Genesis 19:30-38
http://www.biblegateway.com/cgi-bin/bible?language=english&passage=Genesis+19%3A30-38&version=NIV]

"So much for 'returning' to Biblically based family values! Again, you have to wonder what could possibly have saved these severely pathological human beings from the punishment leveled against Sodom. Having Lot for a father has obviously crippled these women psychologically."

I've been using the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and the heading it provides for this section is "The Shameful Origin of Moab and Ammon"--the Moabites and Ammonites being neighbors (rivals?) of Israel. Deuteronomy contains prohibitions against harassing the Moabites and Ammonites, because their lands were given to them as descendants of Lot. So it seems this passage is more "aetiological" (assigning a cause) than a commentary on family values.

(The family values of Biblical times were indeed radically different from contemporary values, even "traditional" contemporary values, but that's a topic for another time).

As for why they were saved, we have Genesis 19:29...

[Genesis 19
29 So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived.
http://www.biblegateway.com/cgi-bin/bible?language=english&passage=Genesis+19%3A29&version=NIV]

It seems to be more for the sake of Abraham's relationship to Lot, and so to Lot's family, than anything else.

Peace,
Mark Kille
John P. Webster Library

Why do we say that God is good? What is the basis for saying God is love? I am not denying this could be the reality, but what is the foundation for our understanding of the nature of God?

Are these beliefs rooted in the Bible? Chapters 12-24 present a discouraging picture of God. In those chapters, God is imperialistic. God condones barbaric behavior by people like Lot and Abraham. A man who would have handed his young daughters over to be raped by a mob is praised as righteous. Another man is fanatical enough to kill his own son for the sake of his beliefs. If Abraham had held the knife to his own throat, perhaps he might have a better claim to being a righteous man, but how does a man who is willing to kill his own defenseless child become the father of his country? Two young women, in as depraved a scenario as one can imagine, get their father drunk and cause him to impregnate them. Surely if anyone is ever to be judged for "sinful behavior" it would be these two, but they were among the ones found to be righteous enough to be saved from the destruction of Sodom.

Is this the basis for our religious beliefs? Are we to say that all this imagery of God is wiped away because of the message of Jesus Christ? If so, then why does the Bible on the altar include the Old Testament as well as the New? I remember reading somewhere that God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. That means having to hold onto Genesis 12-24 with as much intensity as the Sermon on the Mount.

Is it consistent to quote only the verses that support the idea that God is love while ignoring verses like the ones cited above? I don't remember hearing any sermons on the origins of the Moabites and Ammonites, but I recall plenty of sermons that used scriptural passages supporting the idea that God is good. But how can God be good if God supports and saves people like crazy old Lot and his psychopathic daughters and also allows and leads the conquest of the indigenous Canaanites?

Are these beliefs about the goodness and love of God rooted in places outside the Bible? Do we see the love of God in men and women like Albert Schweitzer and Florence Nightingale, Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa? If we do, then how can it be that the canon includes the highly dysfunctional and self-destructive family of Lot while it excludes any of a number of average families that love, honor and protect each other? Is it that opening up the canon for review would be too messy, too "not politically correct"?

Is our belief in God as being a God of love based on wishful thinking? Is it based on fear and intimidation?

In Genesis God aligns himself with and supports Lot, a criminal who encourages the mob rape of his daughters rather than be thought of as an unfit host. Is this the same God people sing praises to as a God of love on Sunday mornings? What is the pruning method that allows such a belief to be held with authenticity?

Hi David,

"Why do we say that God is good?"

It is our testimony as a community of faith.

"What is the basis for saying God is love? I am not denying this could be the reality, but what is the foundation for our understanding of the nature of God? Are these beliefs rooted in the Bible?"

Our basis for saying God is love is our experience and our imagination, along with the experience and imagination of the faithful recorded in the Bible. This kind of evidence can be tricky for Word-loving Protestantism, which is the UCC's denominational inheritance. In this answer, I am borrowing the thoughts of Alister McGrath, from his book "The Twilight of Atheism" (Doubleday, 2003):

"A distinctive feature of the Reformation...is the 'desacralization' of nature...The material world might have been created by God; it could not, however, convey the divine presence. God's presence was no longer channeled directly into the world through natural means...God had chosen to reveal himself through the Bible, and the authorized mode of knowing God was therefore through reading the Bible, and hearing sermons based upon its contents...Attention was thus shifted away from the idea of a direct presence of God in the sacramental bread and wine to an indirect manner of knowing God through preaching...Pietism was an important correcting influence in Protestantism, restoring the possibility of experiencing God directly in everyday life. Yet the dominant voices of mainline Protestant orthodoxy presupposed a disembedded God--a God who was now dislocated from the world of nature, culture, and human experience...Protestantism is open to another related criticism--namely, that it has impoverished the Christian imagination, and by doing so, made atheism appear imaginatively attractive." (pp. 200-206)

(It is worth mentioning that McGrath is a Protestant himself).

Trends in contemporary Protestantism show a move away from this "scripture only" basis of belief. McGrath again: "On the basis of recent statistics, Pentecostalism is by far the largest strand of Protestantism, and shows continuing growth patterns globally." (TToA, p. 216)

In America, the (apparently?) most lively and large single segment of Protestantism--evangelicalism--has seen movement towards the teaching/preaching-poor, worship/community-rich megachurches as well as towards "charismatic" versions of Anglicanism, Catholicism, and even Orthodoxy. Meanwhile, mainline churches are being criticized for supposedly weakening the authority of scripture. Anyway you look at it, the Bible is losing ground as the single preeminent source and shaper of belief.

All this is a long-winded elaboration on people rediscovering what Mardie Chapman described so clearly in her "Bible: 'God Speaking?'" post:

"I think it's a wonderful gift that we can look to church tradition, our own reason and experience, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit (which may include directly hearing what we believe is God's voice), and scripture, all in the context of the community of Christians. Even when we may not hear God's voice in a loud boom or a silent whisper, God is still speaking."

Returning to your thoughts...

"Chapters 12-24 present a discouraging picture of God. In those chapters, God is imperialistic. God condones barbaric behavior... Is this the basis for our religious beliefs?"

The stories related in Genesis 12-24, as they were understood and used by the faith community (communities, really) of ancient Israel, are one place we go to find descriptions of the God we believe in.

"Are we to say that all this imagery of God is wiped away because of the message of Jesus Christ?"

Are we to say that we should toss out the theology of "the promises of God" and "the requirement of obedience to God" and "the faithfulness of God" because this theology was expressed in culturally-bound understandings of "promise" and "obedience" and "faithfulness" that are rightfully rejected by us because of our own culturally-bound understandings of these ideas? (Thanks to Nan Streeter for a fuller discussion of this in her recent post).

"If so, then why does the Bible on the altar include the Old Testament as well as the New?"

Because it is the testimony of communities of faith that Christians are connected to by a direct, continuous line of theological understanding. (Not that there aren't other traditions as well that are connected to the Hebrew Bible by a direct, continuous line of theological understanding).

"I remember reading somewhere that God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. That means having to hold onto Genesis 12-24 with as much intensity as the Sermon on the Mount."

Only if a) we see all books of the Bible as falling into the same genre, written and intended to be received in the same way; and b) we make a direct identification of God with the descriptions of God found in the Bible. Technically, the latter is known as bibliolatry, and even American evangelicals are starting to be on guard against it.

Peace,
Mark Kille
John P. Webster Library

Hi David:

We cannot judge the small nomadic semitic tribe that emigrated from Mesopotamia to Canaan with modern day standards. They needed two things to survive: a land where they could grow their herds of animals, and a way to perpetuate their family leadership. Abraham heard God promise him to make his family into a great nation, if he would relocate his whole family (Gen. 12.) to Canaan. They were a small wandering tribe among many without a conquering army, simply sharing the land with others as many nomads do. God said he would make his descendents as numerous as stars in the heavens and the sands on the beach of the seashore (Gen.22:15) if he would obey his voice.

God appears to Isaac in the same way (Gen.26.1-5) saying that he would multiply his descendents if he would do as Abraham did – listen to God’s voice, keep his commandments, statutes and laws. (the only requirement we are told of is circumcision) God comes to Jacob also in a dream promising that his descendents shall spread abroad to east and west, north and south.

But the problem is that the wives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are barren. How can the descendents multiply like the dust? God made them barren, then God finally let them conceive – poor Sara at 90. The custom of all patrilinear tribes is to insure succession. Everything was tried, lying with maid servants, concubines, and in Lot’s case, incest, but in the case of this tribe, the son must come from the wife of the patriarch to be the legitimate heir.

The job of the patriarch is to insure the survival of his tribe’s leadership and it seemed as if the only way that could happen was through God’s help. Seen through those eyes, one can understand all the strange things done and happening to women. Also there is the conviction that this tribe is special and cannot intermarry with the other tribes occupying the same territories as they did. They make a great effort to go back to the same gene pool to procure wives.

Looking at this through today’s eyes, it seems that intermarriage was damaging the health of the tribe, especially Jacob and Rachel – first cousins. All the side players found healthier partners and came back to haunt the patriarchial family.

To summarize, this is a great story, passed on by oral tradition, that emphasizes the great promise or Covenant of God to a chosen people, and the legitimacy of its leaders through direct descendents. Certainly there should be no time spent on trying to point out all the unfair things that they did to each other. I think we should concentrate on the question – did Abraham really hear the voice of God or the voice of his shrewd inner consciousness that he had to move? Did he hear what he wanted to hear? Does it matter?

Nan

It is significant that our summer Bible study starts with this passage in Genesis 12:1. "Now the Lord said to Abram. 'Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I shall show you.'" As we know, that was to the promised land of Israel, Jerusalem, the city where God would be worshipped, the place metaphorically, if we are to believe the Story, where humanity finds its fulfillment even if it is only in promise, in faith believed rather than sight seen. It is no slip of the tongue where in one of the NT letters Christ is metaphorically depicted as the Israel of God, the place wherein God is incarnated into the human story, a new covenant Israel, which, at least for Christians as traditional theology has it, is a surer sign of things to come.

This calling is a stark challenge to leave everything that we know, that we possess, that we are comfortable with for the larger fulfillment of a calling to walk toward the Holy Land based on the promise that sealed the first covenant. Two things stand out for me. The first is that the Promised Land is always beckoning, a holy place that at best we can only partially inhabit even as the city of man is invariably mixed in with that portion of the city of God that we may gain a glimmering of now and then. The second factor is the reality of the calling, a calling, that still small voice, that, to be heard, takes both a capacity to listen and a willingness to act on its promptings. The call to Abram was crucial, but just as important were his responses, from the faint, but clear voice of God to those tentative first steps. The journey, both Abraham's and the Israeli people through 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, was far from a straight road in which there were failings as well as partial gleanings. That same journey that Christ took from Galilee to Jerusalem, from his baptism to the desert and ultimately to the road of Golgotha, but also to the promise of Emmaus, though having its own perils, was also based on the faithfulness of the calling gleaned by faith rather than sight on which the Christ staked his very life.

And so with us. What does it mean for us both to hear and to respond to the call both in the wilderness and on the pathway toward clearer signposts of the ultimate destination--that being the kingdom of God on earth and our role in ushering it in, however partially so? To respond to that perpetual prompting to transcend the boundaries of our self constructions in a manner that leads us to that new country of vulnerability, brokenness, and shared life. In an embrace of the various shadow voices within our own lives, and to the embrace of relations with others beyond our comfort level, and to tasks and challenges that are at the edge of our lives that we are reluctant to embody, which the still small voice of God may be prompting to consider.

Those promptings may be there, but beyond any capacity to actively work toward achieving them is the connection with the Holy Center, the Ground of Being as the ultimate source of meaning and power, lest we depend on the idolatry of our own resources to achieve such transcendent ends. Thus the worship of God as an end in itself is a high calling of one compelled to follow this pathway, a capacity to worship that may be as essential as it is problematic in its difficulties and in the quest to embody the many good things of this life as secular gods to which we commit our passions and our being.

That new country to which Father Abraham was called; is its pursuit the very pathway to new life or the sorriest of illusions upon which humankind ever envisioned? We know the storied answer of our Two Testaments. In what ways is its narrative baseline synonymous with our most compelling stories and in what ways may it be different? Is that difference one of fundamental difference in which the very notion of a transcendent, but intimate God is a foreign entity that cannot enter into our country, or is it a matter of rigorous interpretative work in order to hook up the textual baseline of the Scripture with our existential stories of the early 21st century?

The issue, I believe, is nothing that can be resolved on the playing field of reason and logic, but requires the risk of its embrace as a live possibility in which its promise pulls us forward with, but in a manner beyond the capacity of our reason to fully grasp. The very gamble that the risk is worth the taking can only be made on faith, though the other side is we have no choice but to believe in any event even if the believing is in the conclusion that the gamble isn't worth the effort. Either way, we live in the country, though which country we habituate is partially dependent on whose voice we hear and respond to. Whether we hear a voice, whether we are called may be something that is only given to us without which we could never respond.

George Demetrion

Hi George:

George:

You make the point that the Promised land is always calling and that a still small voice prompts us and gives us a willingness to act.

My problem is how do you know that that call and that inner prompting is coming from the voice of God. Pol Pot had a vision of an idealized agrarian communist society. He acted on it by killing 2 million people. Alexander the Great had a vision of creating a world monarchy. His armies brought the Hellenistic civilization to Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Asia up to western India. Jim Jones was a pastor who developed an inter racial mission for the sick, homeless and jobless. His vision led him to the suicides at Jonestown.

Abraham could have moved to Canaan because his family couldn’t flourish in Ur and he had heard of the milk and honey of Canaan. That’s what the 49'ers did when they came to California. To want something and to act on it is often done in the name of God. The American Revolution is certainly couched in those terms.

We tend to say it is the voice of God when the outcomes seem fair and good, and it is the voice of inner demons of Hitler and Pol Pot when the outcomes are bad.. How do we differentiate between the good voices and the selfish voices? Or if we hear the good voices, how do we know if the actions we take are the right ones?

Nan

Hi Nan,

I know you addressed your question to George, but I hope you don't mind if I give an answer as well.

"My problem is how do you know that that call and that inner prompting is coming from the voice of God...How do we differentiate between the good voices and the selfish voices?"

I know of two established principles that various Christian communities have used in judging alleged messages from God.

First, there is the simple fact that the message is received in a community, and therefore is judged by that community. A formal example of this is the discernment committees set up in Episcopal churches when a member feels called to the priesthood; an informal (and absurd) hypothetical example is that if I stood up in my home congregation and announced that God wanted us all to wear our underwear on our heads, the underwear-hat movement wouldn't get very far. This principle assumes that the individual will take the community's judgement seriously (though not uncritically), and also assumes that the community will take the individual's message seriously. (Who knows, maybe there's actually an urgent reason behind the underwear hats).

Second, there is the principle that any new Word from God will not contradict the existing Word of God--which usually means the Bible as understood by that faith community. A "conservative" example of this would be anti-homosexual communities refusing to accept a message about embracing actively GLBT people, because it would contradict the model for human families they understand to be set out in the Bible. A "liberal" example of this would be progressive communities refusing to accept a message about the necessity of war, because it would contradict the love-your-neighbor, love-your-enemy commands in the Bible.

Obviously, neither principle is foolproof--communities can stifle individuals, and private prejudices can be enshrined as "Biblical truths." But they're a start.

A third principle, not always as well established, is humility. Pol Pot was not humble. Alexander the Great was not humble. Jim Jones was not humble. At least, not as I understand humility.

Peace,
Mark Kille
John P. Webster Library

Hi Nan,

Thanks for your comments.

In terms of knowing, we don't know in that faith comes before seeing. On that, Abraham's experience is similar to Moses' as well as to Jesus' and certainly the apostles. It required a stepping out on faith, though clearly based on a perceived calling, which, in turn, required verification in the crucible of living experience.

We certainly have gleanings, and I think Mardie summed it up nicely in linking faith to the four components, Scripture, the Holy Spirit, feedback from the faith community and others, and common sense. Of course, this does not lead to infallibility, and if it did lead to sure knowledge it would be something other than religious faith. As it is stated in the book of Hebrews, Faith is the substance of things hoped for but unseen. That's a basic biblical precept that cuts across the Old and New Testaments, our core canonical text without which, the very meaning of what it means to believe in what the Bible refers to as the living God would literally be nonsensical. In the sense of providing a core structure for the Judeo-Christian belief system, this Bible is a foundational resource, however metaphorically and non-literally it is taken, yet a resource, that in principle, that has the capacity to grapple with the fundamental issues in our era even while providing a source of judgment over them.

In my mind the question is the extent to which any of this "God talk" is viable at all, a concern of no minor significance in the contemporary realm of secular modernity/postmodernity. There are many in the contemporary setting who would dismiss the Christian narrative as meaningless, a thought that has crossed my mind on more than one occasion, though the presuppositions that underlie that stance, also cannot stand on its own.

The issue in my mind is whether there is a transcendent source of life giving, which, while entering into the natural, is in, at least a mythical and metaphorical sense, beyond it, in which the mystery, ultimately, is of more fundamental consequence than what it is we actually know through our reason, experience, and knowledge. Of course, "God" is mediated through these sources of human experience, but it's also more than plausible (and perhaps essential) to consider "His" mediation through the revelation of His text. However problematic that may seem, that, I argue, is nothing lightly to dismiss, particularly if one is going to grapple meaningfully with the Judeo-Christian ethis.

None of this, obviously can be proven, and I will grant that it's very easy to go off the deep end in pursuit of the Holy. That temptation, at least to some degree, is probably unavoidable among those who seek to take this dimension of human existence with radical seriousness, without which, it may be impossible to enter into its pathways. Perhaps the more problematic error is in mistaking a belief, particularly those of crucial significance for us, as synonymous with knowledge as this pathay never moves beyond faith, however existentially real it seems.

In the Abrahamic story, there is a prompting by the Spirit, which gave Abraham his initial sense of direction, though without the journey, including a grappling with the doubts, the by-paths, and the self corrections, arguably, by the Spirit itself, the spiritual "proof" of the calling would not have been available. Christ, as the narrative has it, put his faith to the test on the hill at the cross and cried out "why hast thou forsaken me? Though Christ was directed by the Spirit, his knowedge remained grounded and subordinated in faith, never reaching the sense of certainty that no longer required a leap, a leap into a profoundly rich tradition which he sought to revitalize.

I see this Christian pathway as a rich potentiality, yet only the "truth" in a metaphorical and partial sense in that The Way opens up avenues to life giving that, while perhaps available in other ways, can and has opened up the way toward the Holy for many, including myself, at least at times in my life, that can only be experienced in the living itself.

I don't think there's any beyond this perpetual quest of faith seeking knowledge, though there is the potential for direction through partial gleanings. In any event, with Abraham, we do live in the country and it is in the country where we live out our destination. On his faith journey, it was less significant which country he came from than to where he was going, a journet, I believe, that can be no less significant for ourselves. That we will exercise faith in this life is a given, no matter what we believe, no matter what we do, as the striving for the truth and for fulfillment and community extends often beyond our capacity to realize it. We therefore have but little choice but to throw projections into the world and throough them aspire to our perpetual being in process of ever becoming. A challenege of no minor significance is whether those projections through the instrumentalities of religious images, and particularly so, of a tapping into the Christian imagination, will serve as resources of new life, resources, perhaps of such importance that they shape core aspects of who we are.

That knowedge is only gained in the living, but even there, we continue to see in a glass darkly, notwithstanding the glimmering illuminations that come our way from time to time.

George Demetrion

Mardie,

"Reflection on these passages has reminded me of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral and how we may "check" our discernment in a variety of ways not available to Abraham's family."

I had not heard before of the "Wesleyan Quadrilateral". I appreciate your bringing it to my (our) attention. I would think of the goal of this quadrilateral in terms more like a triangle, with tradition, inspiration and scripture (not limited to the Old and New Testament) all flowing into and contributing to our experience.

Mark,

"Current scholarship...regards such historical data as doubtful at best, so that we must treat the materials as a product of traditional communal remembering." (Brueggeman)

It seems to me that we are then placing "the materials" in the category of myth. I agree this is the category for most of the stories and accounts of the Bible. However, it was not my experience that either people in the pulpit or the pew approached the story of Abraham (among the many others) from that perspective. I think we are seeing the "disconnect" that George has mentioned more than once between "current scholarship" and the experience of what is likely the majority of worshippers on Sunday morning. We might ask Nan's question at this point: "Does it matter?" If people go to church on Sunday morning and they hear something that gets them through the rest of the week with more purpose, courage and serenity then does it really matter if there beliefs are based on historical fact or mythology? In the end it possibly doesn't and a case could be made for saying (to people like me, among others), "Leave well enough alone before you find yourself with a millstone tied around your neck."

"With Marcus Borg (Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, 2001, p.62) I ask: "Why did ancient Israel tell [this] story? And why did they tell [it] this way?"

That's a good question, but the traditional (as I understood it) answer would be that "ancient Israel" didn't tell this story. God is the storyteller, so that was the only way the story could be told. It seems to me that if we believe the storyteller is anyone other than God, then the Holy Bible takes its place among other ancient texts, thereby losing its exclusive "Holy" title and/or sharing it with other scriptural texts. I can live with that. How about others in this gathering?

"The Canaanites might have the land now, but someday, it will be ours, because God is faithful."

What is God faithful to? If God of the Universe is faithful to one small tribe to the exclusion of other tribes, then what solace and inspiration can we, in good conscience, take from that? If God is faithful to principles that transcend tribal boundaries and definitions, then how does kicking the Canaanites out of their own land honor these principles?

"A good example of this is the ongoing experience of African Americans in the United States, who have endured slavery and segregation and racism and indifference and other forms of disinheritance at the hands of white 'Canaanites.'"

To me, the analogy is more accurately stated by comparing the Canaanites to the Native Americans of the New World who were displaced in similar fashion, and with similar rhetoric, by the European powers of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

"As for why they were saved, we have Genesis 19:29..."

It seems to be more for the sake of Abraham's relationship to Lot, and so to Lot's family, than anything else."

God "saves" people based on whom they know and associate with? That seems to be one way of phrasing the New Testament message. I can't help but think of all the good and honorable Canaanites who were slaughtered at the command of "God" while degenerates like the family of Lot are "saved" and judged righteous.

"What could the people of Sodom done that was worse than this?" (David)

"In the eyes of the ancient Israelites or in our own modern eyes?" (Mark)

If God is the same yesterday, today and forever, then it seems there cannot be too much discrepancy between our modern eyes and their ancient eyes. How can we so enthusiastically claim the Bible as the foundation of our modern day faith (or at least one of its four corners) when we are talking about the love and faithfulness of God and then differentiate between ancient and modern outlooks when we are looking at texts that don't usually make it into the scripture reading on Sunday morning?

"I am not saying that we should not look judgmentally upon a society that devalued women and children as, essentially, property; we should and must!"

I know you do. Many others do not. This devaluation in our present time has its roots in an uncritical reading of stories like these. It does matter after all how we approach these stories and the traditions that have sprung from them.

"But some have interpreted the Sodom story in Genesis as being set up to show precisely what the community saw as worse than giving up your daughters for rape."

Isn't it strange that we don't know what that "sin" was that led to the Sodom atrocity? People are perfectly content to read about the wholesale slaughter of an entire city and at the same time they have no idea what was behind this massacre. The usual answer is that it had something to do with some of the townspeople wanting to "sodomize" the angel messengers. But the messengers were being sent to warn of Sodom's destruction because of previous acts. If those previous acts were anything worse than what Lot did to his daughters, I can't imagine what they were. That's probably just as well.

Nan,

"We cannot judge the small nomadic Semitic tribe that emigrated from Mesopotamia to Canaan with modern day standards."

Then how can we judge as true for our times one of the key ideas of that "small nomadic Semitic tribe": God is appeased for our wrong-doing by blood sacrifice? This concept has nothing to do with "modern day standards" in any aspect of our lives except for an hour on Sunday morning. I have never understood what the standard is for not judging some passages by "modern day standards" while at the same time holding up other passages as the foundation for our faith. With all due respect, I don't see how we can have it both ways.

"God appears to Isaac in the same way (Gen.26.1-5) saying that he would multiply his descendents if he would do as Abraham did -listen to God's voice, keep his commandments, statutes and laws."

Is this a mythologically or historically based statement you are making here?

"But the problem is that the wives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are barren. How can the descendents multiply like the dust? God made them barren, then God finally let them conceive - poor Sara at 90."

Same question as above.

"Looking at this through today's eyes, it seems that intermarriage was damaging the health of the tribe, especially Jacob and Rachel - first cousins. All the side players found healthier partners and came back to haunt the patriarchical family."

I agree with this. It makes sense and it is clear. Why then is it necessary to take this and put it in "Biblical" terms with "God said this" and "God said that" as if that is what was literally happening in an historical time and place?

Why not just say, on Sunday morning, "This was what happened to these people and this is how they interpreted the event's meaning. When they heard thunder coming from the mountain, they thought it was God's voice speaking to them. Of course, we know it wasn't God's voice, it is the sound that is made when a cold air mass comes into contact with a warm air mass."

But that isn't what gets said (at least it wasn't in my experience). We say, in effect, that the thunder coming from the mountain was, in fact, the voice of God, even though we know it was the same thunder we might hear later on this hot and sticky night. We momentarily see the experience through the eyes of this "small, nomadic Semitic tribe" and we say, for an hour on Sunday morning, that their experience applies to us in the same way as it did to them. We say (it sounds to me), "God made them barren, God let them conceive" in much the same way as someone would have several thousand years ago. In so doing, it seems we turn our backs on all we have learned about the human body in the intervening centuries.

Is it possible to be people of faith and speak in the language that Nan uses above?

"To summarize, this is a great story, passed on by oral tradition, that emphasizes the great promise or Covenant of God to a chosen people, and the legitimacy of its leaders through direct descendents."

It's a great story if you're not a Canaanite.

"Certainly there should be no time spent on trying to point out all the unfair things that they did to each other"

I respectfully disagree. What we read about in the promise made to a chosen people goes far beyond the concept of unfairness. If we don't look at the shadow content of the "Covenant of God" then we end up with a highly distorted and limited view of reality. Keeping this "promise" meant terrible suffering for many innocent people. We must look at the agony and injustice of this suffering if there is to be any hope of ever breaking the cycle of death and destruction that mankind afflicts on itself.

"I think we should concentrate on the question - did Abraham really hear the voice of God or the voice of his shrewd inner consciousness that he had to move?"

I don't know if there is any way to answer such a question conclusively. It all comes down to faith, what we choose to believe. But if we look at the suffering this move caused the people who were already living in the "promised land", I think it is doubtful that a God of love would have been the one to suggest or command such a move. If God whispered in Abraham's ear, then maybe God also whispered in the ear of the settlers moving west under the banner of "Manifest Destiny". Maybe the genocide carried out against Native American tribes was also God's idea.

George,

"The issue, I believe, is nothing that can be resolved on the playing field of reason and logic, but requires the risk of its embrace as a live possibility in which its promise pulls us forward with, but in a manner beyond the capacity of our reason to fully grasp."

What risk are you referring to? What are we gambling?

Mark,

"Why do we say that God is good?" (David)

"It is our testimony as a community of faith." (Mark)

What exactly is this testimony based on?

"First, there is the simple fact that the message is received in a community, and therefore is judged by that community. A formal example of this is the discernment committees set up in Episcopal churches when a member feels called to the priesthood"

Other denominations have a similar arrangement. Quakers have what they call "clearness committees" who meet with people who are considering joining the Religious Society of Friends.

"An informal (and absurd) hypothetical example is that if I stood up in my home congregation and announced that God wanted us all to wear our underwear on our heads, the underwear-hat movement wouldn't get very far."

I wouldn't be too quick to assume that. If you were a highly persuasive and charismatic leader (maybe you are), you might just get people to do that and more. There's a long, long list of people doing some very absurd things in the name of "what God wants us to do" because some powerful authority figure told them what God wants from them.

"Second, there is the principle that any new Word from God will not contradict the existing Word of God--which usually means the Bible as understood by that faith community."

Does such a principle actually exist? The Bible is filled from beginning to end with contradictions, some big, some small. But even one little nit-picking contradiction would serve to refute the validity of this principle. And when you say "faith community" are you referring to the entire Christian church, a denomination, a single church, a small informal gathering (such as Theotalk)?

"A "conservative" example of this would be anti-homosexual communities refusing to accept a message about embracing actively GLBT people, because it would contradict the model for human families they understand to be set out in the Bible. A "liberal" example of this would be progressive communities refusing to accept a message about the necessity of war, because it would contradict the love-your-neighbor, love-your-enemy commands in the Bible."

Both the liberal and the conservative are cherry picking, albeit from different branches. But I'm not sure there is any way to avoid this approach. The question remains, how do we decide which parts of the Bible are wheat and which parts are chaff?

"A third principle, not always as well established, is humility. Pol Pot was not humble. Alexander the Great was not humble. Jim Jones was not humble. At least, not as I understand humility."

Abraham, David, Solomon, Joshua, Peter, Paul.none of them were humble either.

Hi David:

Those evil Canaanites?

I don't think we should compare the arrival of Abraham in Canaan as an invasion or even a gradual takeover as with the Native Americans and the settlers in America's history. Understanding the Old Testament by Bernhardt Anderson tells about the discovery of thousands of clay tablets at Nuzi in 1919 which give us a pretty good picture of this period. The Aribu or Habiru (Hebrews) were"wanderers or outsiders living on the fringes of society" among the settled people of Canaan. Abraham "with his flocks and his family moved through the sparsely settled hill country, wandering from place to place until he settled down in Mamre near the place where Hebron was later established.... Indeed so shallow were the roots of these Hebrews in Canaan that during a time of great famine Jacob migrated with his family into Egypt." Abraham's family was one of many who fled Ur after the downfall of the Sumerian dynasty. "..Many people peoples were mingling together in the Fertile Cresecent. Canaan was, indeed, 'the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites' (Ex 3:17)." The Habiru were so insignificant that they are not usually mentioned among the people of Canaan at that period. We hear no stories of battles and Patriarchs going to war.

This brings us to the crux of the problem of looking at Genesis. The Bible itself is not the literal voice of God in my mind. It is the story of a people who reported they heard the voice of God and who either obeyed it or didn't obey it, and who told their story through the oral tradition. It is a series of books with different authors - poetry, history, laws, prophecy, personal accounts - all told for different purposes to different generations. The Bible forces you to pick and choose. God says one thing one time to them, and the opposite another time. You can't believe both. You ask what standards would we use to judge which sayings of God are "true" and which are "false"? I choose to use Jesus's two commandments as the test of the validity of all that God is telling us through the Bible.

Also we tend to think of the Bible as static, while it really is dynamic. As the generations suffer exile and return, their thinking matures, then Jesus comes and Christians have tacked on that to the Jewish Bible, and then more things happen, but the Church, in its wisdom, decides to freeze the story of the people who follow the God of Abraham and Jesus in 90 A.D into its cannon. If we kept the story going as the great thinkers of the world grapple with their experience of God and Jesus and reinterpret it for each generation, we would have scriptures that we could understand better and relate to better. God is speaking to us as much today as God spoke to Paul.

By the way as a non sequitur, Have you read Time Magazine's current issue - Faith, God and the Oval Office. It talks about Bush becoming born again under Billy Graham's influence, his deep religious faith, and his considering his divine mandate "to rid the world of evil doers". In the eyes of those who support him, even though they disagree with some of his policies, they do so because his faith is the morally guiding force in his life. 85% answer yes to Time's question "Does Bush's religious faith make him a strong leader." Bush is the leader of his nation. Abraham was the leader of his nation. They both heard God's voice speaking to them. Who is being informed by the "true" voice of God?

Nan

Dear Nan,

"I don't think we should compare the arrival of Abraham in Canaan as an invasion or even a gradual takeover as with the Native Americans and the settlers in America's history."

That is a good point because it is more historically accurate than what I have been saying. In the same way, it would not be good history to portray, in and of itself, the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock as "an invasion". At the same time, we know that the benign settlement at Plymouth grew into a cancerous growth for the Native American populations from Massachusetts to California. That is not our view, of course. We (white people) tend to see the "winning of the west" in glorious, majestic terms. But the various tribes of North America can certainly be excused for having a different perspective.

I think the main point here is not so much when the suffering began as it is the acknowledgment that enormous suffering did take place because of the "promise" God made to "His people". How do we worship God with integrity and view God as "Love" when we see the bloodshed that occurred later to make that promise a reality? True, we could say that our awareness of God has evolved. We might even say that God Him/Herself has evolved. If we say, "the Bible is not the literal word of God" then I think such possibilities are open to us.

"We tend to think of the Bible as static, while it really is dynamic."

I think that is true if we look at the Bible as something of and for the living and not the dead. The only way to do that is to see the Bible as being constantly written, as much alive and growing today as it was in the days of Moses and Jesus. But it was not my experience that churches approach the Bible in a dynamic way. Rather, the Bible was confined to a "static" canon.

I'm sure kids still get dressed up in shepherd's costumes and angel wings and wise men's beards at Christmas. I certainly don't want to stop parents and grandparents from seeing their children singing "Away in the Manger" on Christmas Sunday. But at the same time we hold onto these sweet traditions for our children, it seems to me that there ought to be an adult understanding that the presence and reality of God is not limited to a single night in Bethlehem thousands of years ago. Otherwise we really are as much "stuck" in another time as we would be if we dressed up like shepherds everyday.

"Like Homer, the story of the Trojan War is gripping, and somewhat factual, but we don't read it for that purpose."

I wonder what the outcome for our faith would be if we approached the Bible in the same way we approach the Iliad and the Odyssey. What would we lose with such an approach? What would we gain?

"Instead of rejecting the Bible, though, I see its great truths through its metaphors and great stories."

We don't spend our time worrying about whether there really was a Trojan horse when we read the Iliad. Instead we focus our thoughts on enjoying a good story and considering what the story tells us about human nature. But people spend all kinds of time and energy trying to find the remains of Noah's Ark and the location of the Garden of Gethsemane. We seem to think that the "Holy Land" is thousands of miles away because that was the location of the stories we read about in the Old and New Testament. A literal reading places the Bible outside of us.

"I feel the presence of God in Jesus in my life in the 21st century and that is what counts."

I think finding that out for ourselves is what Theotalk is all about.

Seems to me that while God can inspire a human to write what is later regarded as "inspired scripture" the inspired scripture never rises above the writer's intelligence or culture. It is written within the confines of what that person perceives to be correct.

Nancy

P.S. I agree with Dave.

Dave:

I think your case for the devastating effects of invasion is when Joshua conquors Canaan according to Josh.1-12. Other older manuscripts show that that Joshua wasn't terribly successful and years were spent in infiltrating and taking over sections of Canaan.

I suspect every race, tribe, or country has gotten possession of its land because they moved in on someone else. Even though the Louisiana Purchase was gained by purchase, Spain never consulted the inhabitants or gave them the money. Even in the Bible might makes right.

Nan

Nancy: Seems to me that while God can inspire a human to write what is later regarded as "inspired scripture" the inspired scripture never rises above the writer's intelligence or culture. It is written within the confines of what that person perceives to be correct.

George: A big a-men here! One caveat. Interpretations are multiplicative in their potentiality. Thus, as Nan mentions, Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his only begotten son of the Father provides a powerful hermeneutical vehicle for Christian theology. Pace, Romans 4 is which Abraham's faith is analogized with faith in Christ as opposed to the legalism of works righteousness. As Nan presents it, I believe this is a legitimate Christian interpretation (what the ancient Jews might have referred to as a Midrash) of the Abraham-Isaac tale. On the broader front of interpretation, one could view the NT as a legitimate Midrash of the OT, though I'm more than pleased to be corrected on this speculative assumption. Where such an interpretation becomes problematic, in my view, is when the Christian way is taken as the only way in which the OT is viewed only as a harbinger for the fulfillment in Christ. Clearly this is the prevailing NT strategy, with the result of closing serious dialogue with ancient Jewish theology, though it is heartening to read Romans 9-11 in encountering Paul's profound anxiety in seeking both to come to terms with God's original covenant with Abraham and the fulfillment of the promise in the latter day with Christ revealed as the way, the truth, and the life Thus Paul argues that the more excellent way of Christ was needed because the Jews did not seek God's grace by faith but "by the works of the law" (Romans 9:32). There is also an ironic dimension which Paul notes that the universal promise given to Abraham (Gen. 12-1-3) required a vehicle, namely Christ to transmit the core teachings from Israel to the gentiles. Thus, I might be willing to explore with a contemporary Jewish colleague the possibility that God utilized Christ to proclaim their core message to the world. That was a prospect I would contend that would have been exceedingly unlikely without some type of universalizing solvent that at the same time honored the particularity of Israel's faith lest the very concept of a transcendent yet personal God who acts both within and beyond history became lost in the process of translation, say, via Greek philosophy. I would not argue that any other means but Christ was not possible, but historically, it seems clear that the NT was the primary medium of hermeneutical transmutation by which the God of the OT became comprehensible within the idioms of Greek philosophy. The translation was not perfect, but it was substantial in that the core narratives of both the OT and NT maintained their specificity in the new idiom of gentile conceptual categories. In short, that was some feat.

While making this argument that the NT was a legitimate Midrash of the OT in which the Abrahamic-Isaac story took on a prototypical function in standing for the primacy of faith over works, I am also interested to hear how this Genesis narrative was interpreted within Jewish theology, both in latter parts of the OT and in latter Jewish writings, particularly the Talmud. That kind of analysis is well beyond my knowledge, though on his book on Genesis Brueggemann notes that there are important parallels with the first two chapters of Job. In any event, WB offers the following:

"Like Job, Abraham is a blameless man who fears [i.e., honors] God exceedingly." WB goes on to say, "The poem of Job may very well reveal to us the innards of Abraham which chapter 22 [Genesis] keeps discretely hidden. The dialogue of Job with his friends and with God, expresses the wonderment and dismay of this utterly faithful man who finds the costs of God in deep tension with the joys of God. Neither the Joban poetry nor this Abraham story are about evil or the justice of God. Rather, they ask about faith which, as Kierkegaard has shown, drives us to dread before the self is yielded to God." (p. 189).

Whether WB is stretching a point, I'm not sure, but at the least this type of interpretation honors the emergent hermeneutical work within the OT, which, from a Jewish perspective is sufficient onto itself without the need for any fulfillment in Christ. Moreover, according to Jewish theology, the Exodus story is the primary narrative that lays the structure to the entire edifice of the story of God as revealed in and through Israel. By contrast, in the NT both Adam and Abraham are the more significant figures, serving as typologies that lend coherence to Christian interpretation. Moses is far from insignificant in the NT, esp. in the Gospel of Matthew, though the imagery of the Second Adam (as well as the centrality of the story of the Fall) as the vehicle for depicting the theological importance of the concept of original sin is more of a Christian story than a Jewish one. The salience of the Abrahamic sacrifice both in terms of God sacrificing his son (Christ) and as a metaphor to symbolize Christian faith as opposed to Jewish works has been noted.

A brief quote from Brueggemann from his Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy: "One must recognize that the OT is powerfully polyphonic in its testimony, both in its substantive claims and in its characteristically elusive modes of articulation. Nothing about the theological claims of the Old Testament is obvious or on dimensional. They remain remarkably open" (p. 731). WB continues: “As a confessing Christian, I believe that the imaginative construal of the Old Testament toward Jesus is a credible act and one that I fully affirm.” However, and this is no small matter, “Such an affirmation [that the scriptures were fulfilled in Christ] can only be made from the side of fulfillment, not from the side of the Old Testament,” and as one legitimate reading among others. Thus: “The task of Old Testament theology as a Christian enterprise, is to articulate, explicate, mobilize, and make accessible and available the testimony of the Old Testament in all of its polyphonic, elusive, imaginative power and to offer it to the church for its continuing work of construal toward Jesus. That is, Old Testament theology, in my judgment, must prepare the material and fully respect the interpretive connections made in the New testament and the subsequent church; but it must not make those connections, precisely because the connections are not to be found in the testimony of ancient Israel [i.e., no prefiguring of Christ hidden in the OT text], but in the subsequent work of imaginative construal that lies beyond the text of the Old Testament” (p. 732) as exemplified in the writers of the New Testament.

A final passage:

"If Christian appropriation of the Old testament toward Jesus is an act of claiming the elusive tradition toward Jesus-circumstance, we can recognize that other imaginative appropriations of this elusive tradition are equally legitimate and appropriate. We have yet to decide how christological exclusiveness is to be articulated so that it is not an ideological ground for the dismissal of a co-community of interpretation. Thus, our most passionate affirmation as Jesus as the ‘clue’ to all of reality must allow for other ‘clues’ found herein by other serious communities of interpretation. And of course this applies to none other so directly as it does to Judaism. Thus the Christians are also able to say of the Old Testament, ‘It is ours,’ but must also say, ‘It is not our alone.’ This means to recognize that Jewish imaginative construal of the Old Testament text are, in Christian purview, a legitimate theological activity. More than that, Jewish imaginative construal of the text is a legitimate theological activity to which Christians must pay attention” (p. 735) in itself without any need for a Christian remainder.

A-men brother Walter, a-men!

WB very well could have concluded these observations with the meditation of Paul:

“Oh, the depth and the riches and wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how unscrutable are his ways! (Romans 11:33).

There is depth here that requires continuous probing, a probing that can only begin if we take the Bible seriously, which, among other things requires a refusal to accept simplistic interpretations that fails to do justice to the richness of the text.

George Demetrion

“Romans 4 is which Abraham's faith is analogized with faith in Christ as opposed to the legalism of works righteousness. As Nan presents it, I believe this is a legitimate Christian interpretation (what the ancient Jews might have referred to as a Midrash) of the Abraham-Isaac tale.”

John Spong has written extensively about the use of Midrash as a key to understanding the Bible. This approach tends to make a topsy-turvy of traditional Christian theology, at least as I have understood it. Traditionally, the gospel stories have been supported and bolstered by referring to the idea that the actions of Jesus of Nazareth were performed in accordance with “fulfilling the prophecy” written centuries before his life.

Just one example of that is found in Matthew 27:48 “One of them ran up at once, took a sponge, soaked it in cheap wine, put it on the end of a stick, and tried to make him drink it.” This verse corresponds to Psalm 69:21 “…when I was thirsty, they offered me vinegar”.

The case for claiming the divinity of Jesus is advanced if it can be shown that even the most mundane of his actions were predicated on a divine plan that was originally made known hundreds of years before. But if approached from the perspective of Midrash, then we can see human beings trying to put into words an experience that was far removed from their usual course of events. The only words that could adequately express the nature of their experience with Jesus were words of faith. So in telling the story of Jesus they went back to what we now refer to as the Old Testament and linked his life with what is written there.

When we read the gospel accounts then, we are reading an interpretation of events, not so much the events themselves. This approach takes away something, but it also gains something for us. What does the Theotalk community think about that?

“There is also an ironic dimension which Paul notes that the universal promise given to Abraham (Gen. 12-1-3) required a vehicle, namely Christ to transmit the core teachings from Israel to the gentiles.”

There’s irony in that, also the sense of something valuable that has been lost. What kind of world would we live in today if the energy that has gone into claiming and spreading the divinity of Christ, sacrificed to redeem a fallen humanity, had instead gone into transmitting “the core teachings from Israel” to the world?

“The translation was not perfect, but it was substantial in that the core narratives of both the OT and NT maintained their specificity in the new idiom of gentile conceptual categories. In short, that was some feat.”

Yes, it was, but it was a feat that remains largely unknown or at the very least, barely understood (at least to me). Understanding how the intertwining of the Old Testament with Greek philosophy gave us the fabric of the New Testament seems to be a subject of no small importance. At the same time, how many people go to church on Sunday morning and find themselves strengthened and sustained without ever giving a moment’s thought to Greek philosophy, Kierkegaard, or Brueggemann?

“My point in stressing the text is to draw out something of its countercultural power in establishing an imaginative alternative to the dominant secular, scientifically-nurtured "common-sense" reality that governs the thrust of most of our lives and that of the secular culture in which the concept of "God" is an absurd irrelevancy--a carry-over from a by-gone day that has literally no power to speak in the secular city.”

If we take as a matter of faith that the Bible has the power to balance “the thrust of most of our lives” then it becomes imperative that we use it, not for reasons of piety or tradition, but simply as a matter of living a whole and healthy life. The Bible doesn’t do us much good sitting on an altar with candles and cornucopias surrounding it. Nor are we much helped if we look at or listen to words without considering what they really mean for us. If God is to be other than “an absurd irrelevancy” for us, it seems to me that we need to continue looking at the Bible with practical honesty and a healthy dose of skepticism.

I get a picture in my mind of people sitting around a table in God’s house, talking with God. God wants people to tell him/her what they really think. But they don’t want to insult their host, or worse yet, get the host angry. So they are polite and courteous and they hide behind their nice words and nice smiles and don’t say anything controversial. And then after awhile, people go home and God sits there wondering what has to be done to get people to talk to him/her. Because people didn’t want to sound irreverent, God begins to feel “irrelevant”.

As much as anything, what we are doing here at Theotalk is telling a relevant God, sometimes a bit irreverently (true of me at times), what we really think as we live our lives in the “secular city” of 2004.

Dave: When we read the gospel accounts then, we are reading an interpretation of events, not so much the events themselves. This approach takes away something, but it also gains something for us. What does the Theotalk community think about that?

George: The something lost is any sense of absolute certainty that the Bible itself is the unequivocal word of God, which, as Mark informs us is not reflective of UCC biblical scholarship in any event. The gain is in the possibility for fresh interpretation through a hermeutical encounter of the text and our own current understanding. As Brueggemann informs us, such a hermeneutical dynamic was already operative in the Bible, so on that assumption, nothing new here is actually being proposed in terms of the methodology of interpretation. Substance is another matter.

Dave: (Quoting me) “There is also an ironic dimension which Paul notes that the universal promise given to Abraham (Gen. 12-1-3) required a vehicle, namely Christ to transmit the core teachings from Israel to the gentiles.”

There’s irony in that, also the sense of something valuable that has been lost. What kind of world would we live in today if the energy that has gone into claiming and spreading the divinity of Christ, sacrificed to redeem a fallen humanity, had instead gone into transmitting “the core teachings from Israel” to the world?

George (new): Counterfactual history is always difficult, and given its speculative nature, of limited, but not unimportant value. Though I do not have much knowledge about this, some work along those lines had taken place. The name of Philo comes to mind, but I can't provide details. I think there was some work of a syncretic nature--a sort of blending of Jewish and Greek philosophies, though the sacrifice of Jewish particularity that such work was engendering would have come at a high cost. Whether more would have been gotten in the gain, I have no way of even intelligently speculating. What was gained though Chhristianity was the preservation of Jewish particularity, especially the transcendent, but personal God who works both through and beyond history. That particularity was gained without the encumbrance of Jewish ethnocentricity, which indeed was a varrier to any significant unversal appropriation of the Abrahamic faith. Even still, this was a matter of historical evolution, not necessarily the work of God, though I do not reject the latter out of hand. As we know, the cost for Jews was substantial in the unfolding of Christianity as a distinctive religion, one viewed by its advocates as superior in its unique fulfillment of the Jewish scripture. If I had to make a call here, I would place that at the hands of history rather than those of God, but what do I know about these matters.

The recent messages posted by Nan and Dave are an excellent exhibition of the power and depth of on-line bible study. I, along with many others, I am sure, are exceedingly appreciative of their contribution.

At this time I don't have the time for any substantive reflection, though I would say there's not too much in either of their messages with which I would disagree. At the same time I continue to hold to the various points I made in my little sermonesque-like essay and explanatory note to Nan.

There are at least, several things to consider which I can only enumerate here:

(A) While the first several books in the OT are written in a historical-like narrative, to assume that what is written is historically accurate would be, in my judgment, a mistake. While in a given situation there may not be any particular reason to make such a clarification, the problem comes when someone makes a theological assertion based upon a datum accepted as historical fact. The result can be a wooden literalism that has the potential of reinforcing a dogmatic attitude that mystifies rather than clarifies the nature of a particular spiritual issue or problem. I can't offer an example at this time.

(B) The theological significance of any passage or series of passages is not dependent on their squaring with the historical facts. In the NT, it's not so much the historical aspects of the life of Jesus of Nazareth that is of central importance, or even, in itself, their narrative reconstruction in the various NT books, though both of those are obviously critical. What is, in my view, of fundamental theological and spiritual significance is God acting through Jesus of Nazareth via the medium of the text to those who might hear the message. Now, a word of caution. To accept that word of revelation on faith in terms of both the glimmerings and glass darkly is one thing. That may be sufficient to allow one to act on its premises, though, as the scientists say, fallibilistically so in that it is always faith leading toward knowledge among us in our "earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not us (2 Corinthians 4:7). Thus, there are built-in correcting aspects to the walk in faith and any surety that we may have is always being capable of being deconstructed as it should be if we are speaking of the finite seeking something of the infinite which, by definition goes to the capacity to grasp by human reasoning and imagination.

If we look at the Abrahamic narrative spiritually and theologically, while keeping attuned, as one may deem relevant the gap between the story and history, several things appear. The central thing, in my view, however emergently it might have appeared is the rise of the monotheistic God who speaks in and through history, and who is radically different than the object of its attention. While that object was the people of Israel, there is also a universalistic dimension contained in the core promise (Gen 12: 1-3). Then there is the archetypical faith journey of Abraham through the promise and the doubts, through the wanderings and partial fulfillments mirrored in Exodus in which the search for the Promised Land as an earthly manifestation of the Garden of Eden, if you will (and I'm taking an interpretive leap here) is something that is always on the way and beckoning, but never fulfilled. Even in the NT we have the promise of the Resurrection (a symbol of human fulfillment that I take symbolically and imaginistically rather than literally), but not really the substance of its completion as depicted, if you will, in the vision of the book of Revelation.

I think there's several things to consider:

(1) First, one might seek to grasp something of the spiritual and theological significance of the Abrahamic narrative among the communities that formed the Pentateuch (the books of Moses as they are sometimes inaccurately referred to). From that, significant theological and spiritual work can be done from that alone, so that Synagogues and Christian churches can preach and teach from those core texts alone as part of the pedagogical work of those religious communities. That's what I tried to do in my little sermon. Thus, going into a new country has an infinite expository potential in itself in speaking to contemporary communities, though such speech needs to be critically informed and not accepted as naively true, for it is there where so many problem emerge.

(2) Second, one might seek to grasp how the OT text itself shifted its interpretation, particularly as a result of the Exile in which the triumphal aspects of the promise became considerably muted, though remained viable as a grounded hope in a much more difficult historical climate. On that I would highly recommend Walter Brueggmann's Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile. Thus, it's not a matter of every particular biblical passage on equal par with each other. Rather, interpretation itself is built into the canon in which later interpretations invariably drew selectively from earlier ones and added new dimensions to the picture. That is as true of the OT itself (and W.B. is very persuasive in making this case) as well as in the NT. Thus, in doing effective bible study, I want to know something of the changing theological and spiritual shifts in the depiction of God (a depiction that is invariably a human construct, which does not mean that "God" is not involved, in laying out that prospect, I don't want to make leaps of certitude), and to draw on those changing depictions in the shaping of contemporary theological and spiritual reflections. Again, on that, WB in Hopeful Imagination is very effective.

As we know, the NT writers drew from all of these traditions (Abrahamic-Moses), the prophets, and the wisdom literature) in the creation of their new covenant, which was both remarkably similar, yet strikingly different from the previous biblical tradition. And also, the Jewish community continued to do interpretive work as reflected in the Talmud. Critical interpretative work has continued in both religious traditions and is both biblically sanctioned as reflected in the historical development of the texts that ultimately led to the canon, and is essential if we are to make any substantial sense of these ancient narratives given the various idioms and issues that face the contemporary world.. Thus, there is an ongoing reformist aspect to creative religious development, without which, in my opinion, the prospects of stagnation and sterile (if not dangerous) dogmatic certitudes can only proliferate.

(C) That leaves the issue of the issue of contemporary theology and the biblical cannon, a topic, obviously I can only touch on here. First, some serious qualifications. Specifically, given the incredible pluralism both of our world and of Christian theological interpretation, in my view one can only credibly say that there are a variety of plausible christologies. While none of them is foundational, I do think it is reasonable to identify a basic narrative plot-line from the gospels in which the faith needs to be somehow "authentically" linked to. Even still I acknowledge the tension between low and high christologies between those focused more on the historical Jesus and the Christ of the NT.

Here I can only speak of my preference for narrative theology, which, while problematic like any other theology, has important strengths, which for me, at least provide substantial anchors in which I can hook into even given the many challenges posed by the secular modern/postmodern culture, to which, it should be clear, I am obviously drawn. Again, I've been very informed on this by the various essays of Walter Brueggmann as well as by his opus, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. That major book contains two substantial introductory chapters on modern OT interpretation and a concluding section that raises many issues of concern to contemporary interpreters.

In short, WB is very attuned to the critical issues of contemporary OT scholarship and tackles many of the issues raised her at theotalk and elsewhere. At the same time he draws on the text as containing the core narrative of the faith without which, in his view, the Jewish community and Christian church could only remain mute in the face of powerful objections to its religious assumptions. For WB engagement with those issues is critically important for religious communities to speak vitally, imaginistically, and intelligibly in contemporary settings. That encounter needs to take place with those who are outside the camp if Christianity is to be viewed as a credible source of reality in the culture, even as only a critical countervoice to common assumptions. WB also seeks to also to address those who are inside the camp, yet whose identities are shaped by the confluence of various narratives that include the biblical text, but not necessarily at the epicenter of one's identity.

Thus, while WB accepts the reality of various cultural narratives and seeks very much to enable them to speak in their own various idioms, he is passionate in his insistence that the various religious communities get to speak out of their own idioms. That does not necessarily mean that they speak out of such idioms at what he refers to as the wall of the public square, which in his language, the speech of the secular society remains the common idiom of those seeking conversation in a pluralistic milieu. However, behind the wall, in our sanctuaries and other gathered places we get to (and have to) speak out of our own idiom, the language of religious faith without which the very realization of its potential would be very difficult to effectively realize. More, the conversation behind the wall has very much to do with one's response at the wall even if one seeks to speak through the language of the common idiom of the secular society. For WB (and myself) it is behind the wall (even a wall open to public scrutiny) that one can press the logic of one's religious assumptions to full hilt, which one needs to do in my view, if one is going to seek something of what may actually emerge as a result. In that effort, a powerfully imaginative and subtle reading of the biblical text is a powerful and essential instrumentality in that effort without which the religious community cuts itself off at the knees.

In short, as Jews and Christians, I believe we have little choice but to grapple with our complex and evocatively revealing canonical texts and through critically-informed imaginative construals draw as much value and sustenance as we can from them in often tense and potentially rich encounters with other traditions and interpretations, Dialogue is critically important. So is a substantive articulation of what one stands for. Notwithstanding the flaws in narrative theology, it has much to offer in facilitating critical theological and spiritual development in our contemporary setting. It is meant for study, analysis, and exposition.

George Demetrion
PS I meant this to be a short response.

Jeeez, George, what will it be like when you DO have time to write?

I was looking forward to reading your response, but then saw then it was rather lengthy, so just didn't have the time to even read it. But appreciate the group's various musings, though do not contribute!

TBW

Tom,

Yeah, that one got a hold of me and I ended up giving up what I was "really" going to write this morning. Sometimes I print out longer messages or I save them for another time. Also, perhaps we will be able to transform these exchanges into a durable theotalk web document so that they don't get lost in the immediacy of cyberspace.

George

Hi David,

I will confine my comments to the context of the UCC, because that's our community here, and we have limited influence over what goes on in other communities...

"It seems to me that we are then placing 'the materials' in the category of myth... However, it was not my experience that either people in the pulpit or the pew approached the story of Abraham (among the many others) from that perspective."

I can only speak to what I have seen in the congregations I have worshipped with, and the impressions I have gotten from conference and national publications. None of these settings have taken a historical/literalist approach, either the speakers or the audience.

It is true that you rarely hear anyone say "...not that it really happened this way, most likely." There seems to be what in less inclusive days was called a Gentleman's Agreement, that the stories will be presented on their own terms, allowing the listeners to have their own judgments about their degree of factuality. The idea, as Marcus Borg puts it, is to focus on the Truth of the stories instead of debating their factuality. This arrangement can be problematic in its own way--but not, in my experience, in encouraging people to draw one-to-one correspondences between Genesis and our own societal decision-making.

"That's a good question, but the traditional (as I understood it) answer would be that 'ancient Israel' didn't tell this story. God is the storyteller, so that was the only way the story could be told."

A lot of research has been done about how churchgoers in different denominations view the Bible. (Along with other congregational research, e.g., the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, http://hirr.hartsem.edu/). In my home congregation, when we were preparing our profile for a senior pastor search, the most common answer was "the Bible contains the words of God but is not the literal Word of God," and the second most common answer was "the Bible is a valuable collection of wisdom and teaching." Those seem to be in line with the UCC mainstream.

"It seems to me that if we believe the storyteller is anyone other than God, then the Holy Bible takes its place among other ancient texts"

To me, that seems a false binary. Lamarck's theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics was an evolutionary theory, and Darwin's theory of natural selection was an evolutionary theory, but the scientific community has judged that Darwin turned out to be a lot more right than Lamarck--so Darwin is broadly known about in our culture, while Lamarck isn't. Christian communities have judged that the books of the Bible turned out to be a lot more holy, a lot more right about the nature of God and our relationship to God, than other ancient texts--so we use them broadly, and others less frequently. That's how canonization happens.

The process isn't perfect, or even clear. Just in evolutionary science, there's the "punctuated equilibrium" camp and the slow-but-steady-incremental-change camp, to say nothing of the Intelligent Design folks and others not normally considered to be within the scientific mainstream. It's the same in religion. There are Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, etc., along with cults and other folks considered outside of the religious mainstream. Scientists don't throw up their hands and say "gosh, guess we can't figure out which data and model is most applicable, oh well." Neither can people of faith. We have to make judgments and do our work and play our part in the ongoing conversation.

"What is God faithful to?"

God is faithful to God's chosen people. Obviously, there has been a lot of disagreement about who those chosen people are, both historically and today. In the UCC mainstream, "God's chosen people" seems to me to be articulated as: "God has chosen every single person to be God's people, and so is faithful to every person who accepts that they have been chosen, and arguably to everyone else too." (There seems to be less agreement about what it means to have God treat you faithfully).

Genesis, for us, tells the story of how we came to know that God has chosen us. We can acknowledge that Abraham and his descendants didn't understand that choice in the same way we do today, while still honoring our inheritance from them. The Enlightenment scholars studying optics knew nothing about photons and the particle/wave dual behavior of light, but their findings still formed the foundation of that field.

"What exactly is this testimony based on?"

Well, what I went on to say in my post "Bible: God is good?" was:

Our basis for saying God is love is our experience and our imagination, along with the experience and imagination of the faithful recorded in the Bible.

And then came a lengthy explanation of what I meant by that.

"There's a long, long list of people doing some very absurd things in the name of 'what God wants us to do' because some powerful authority figure told them what God wants from them."

The problem there is that the community is not acting as a community. In a congregation-based polity, there is no excuse for the members of the congregation to let an authority figure have so much power over them. In a hierarchical polity, there is no excuse for an individual authority figure not to be reined in by colleagues and superiors. (Leaving aside the Pope, since I'm not well-versed in Catholic church politics). Of course, it happens anyway--which is why these principles aren't foolproof, just a start.

[ME: Second, there is the principle that any new Word from God will not contradict the existing Word of God--which usually means the Bible as understood by that faith community.]

"Does such a principle actually exist?"

I've only explicitly heard it mentioned by Pentecostals as a general principle, but it frequently comes up in an implicit way in "Scripture vs. Spirit" debates re: sexuality among Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, and UCCers.

"The Bible is filled from beginning to end with contradictions, some big, some small."

Which is why a lot of time and energy is spent trying to prove either that those contradictions aren't actually contradictions, or that there is a meta-narrative that renders narrative contradictions irrelevant.

"But even one little nit-picking contradiction would serve to refute the validity of this principle."

I will go along with Philip Gulley and James Mulholland, in "If Grace is True" (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003):

"Weighing Scripture is discerning which Scriptures accurately reflect God's character. If all Scripture is equally inspired and authoritative, God is as likely to swallow us up in an earthquake or drown us in a flood as God is to forgive our sin and take us into his arms...We are not 'loving God with all our mind' when we refuse to do the necessary work of weighing Scripture on the scales of grace...Weighing Scripture has allowed me to avoid the all-or-nothing approach to the Bible so prevalent in Christianity. I often hear people say, 'If there is one error in the Bible, how can we trust any of it?' I no longer understand this statement. It suggests the only choices are uncritical acceptance or complete rejection...I think Joshua didn't understand the character of God very well. I believe Abraham [and others] didn't fully comprehend the character of God. They contributed valuable insights from their experiences with God, building on the witnesses before them and laying the framework for a fuller revelation of God's character. I believe the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus was this fuller revelation." (pp.53-55)

"And when you say 'faith community' are you referring to the entire Christian church, a denomination, a single church, a small informal gathering (such as Theotalk)?"

All of the above are examples of faith communities, and I think most of us belong to more than one. But it seems to me that interpreting particular Bible passages is usually considered a task for the congregational/denominational level of organization, with only broad issues like the "rule of faith" or the basic canon left to the entire Christian church. (Except when it's convenient for trying to settle denominational disputes).

"The question remains, how do we decide which parts of the Bible are wheat and which parts are chaff?"

Gulley and Mulholland again (IGiT, p.51): "Weighing Scripture is discerning which Scriptures accurately reflect God's character." And (IGiT, p.39): "Jesus challenged slavish devotion to the written word. He encouraged his followers to be in relationship with a God who spoke to them personally."

What is God's character? There are, obviously, different answers to that in different Christian communities. The UCC tends to focus on God as love and grace.

"Abraham, David, Solomon, Joshua, Peter, Paul.none of them were humble either."

I might argue Peter and Paul's relationship to humility...but to the point, the Hebrew Bible figures you mention did things we question today. Since we are considering how to avoid making the same kind of mistakes they did--how to hear God's voice only in the good and not in the evil--then their lack of humility *supports* the principle of the importance of humility.

Peace,
Mark Kille
John P. Webster Library

Hi David,

"I think that is true if we look at the Bible as something of and for the living and not the dead. The only way to do that is to see the Bible as being constantly written, as much alive and growing today as it was in the days of Moses and Jesus."

I think it is appropriate to leave the Bible as it is. Every Christian tradition acknowledges and honors the "fuller understandings" of the faithful that came after, and built on, the witnesses of the Bible. The Catholic and Orthodox traditions are the most obvious examples--but where are the Lutherans without Luther, the Presbyterians without Calvin, the Methodists without Wesley, and so on? Even the most Scripture-only fundamentalists read later doctrines like the Trinity back into the Bible (similar, I suppose, to how Christians read our doctrines back into the Hebrew Bible), and have foundational texts that argue why tradition-al Christianities are distortions instead of refinements.

"But it was not my experience that churches approach the Bible in a dynamic way. Rather, the Bible was confined to a 'static' canon."

But interpreting the Bible--teaching and preaching--has never been static, and has always drawn on many sources. Even for those who believe the Bible reveals its truths clearly in its "plain sense," religious leaders have always felt the need to make sure that their flocks get the correct "plain sense" from their readings.

"I wonder what the outcome for our faith would be if we approached the Bible in the same way we approach the Iliad and the Odyssey. What would we lose with such an approach? What would we gain?"

We would lose the understanding that Homer's epics had a different relationship to Greek religious culture than the Hebrew Scriptures had and has to Jewish religious culture, and the Bible had and has to Christian religious culture.

We would lose the thousands of years of continuity with intense communal wrestling with theological thought that is grounded in the Bible.

We would gain some intellectual pride, maybe. We might put distance between "those" bad Christians and us "enlightened" Christians.

We would end up with a very American religion, in other words. Even more than we already have.

Something I've been thinking about recently, in other contexts, is that Americans love to invoke the past in celebration, but not in repentance. So, there are the July 4 celebrations and Thanksgivings and towns' 150th anniversaries and all that. But raise the question of Native American genocide or African American slavery, and what do you hear? "That was so long ago. Why bring that up now? The past is the past." Leaving aside the question of whether it *was* so long ago or not--why can we claim the good parts of our history as part of our present life, part of "us," but dump the bad parts as "them"?

The Bible, good and bad, is us. The Odyssey and Iliad aren't, not in the same way. Displacing the Bible from the center of our common lives seems dishonest to me.

"We don't spend our time worrying about whether there really was a Trojan horse when we read the Iliad... But people spend all kinds of time and energy trying to find the remains of Noah's Ark and the location of the Garden of Gethsemane."

Unless I'm mistaken in what I've read of those efforts, those aren't UCC people. Not even evangelical UCC people. If we are going to judge how the Bible is used in the UCC today--and why would we look instead at other traditions first?--then shouldn't we look at how the UCC uses the Bible today?

"We seem to think that the 'Holy Land' is thousands of miles away because that was the location of the stories we read about in the Old and New Testament. A literal reading places the Bible outside of us."

A literal reading of the Bible minus a consciousness of church history, maybe. But one of the most overlooked aspects of Christianity in mainline and evangelical churches today is, in fact, its historicity. It *matters* that Jesus was a first-century Jew in Palestine. It *matters* that humanity is inheriting a promise and experiencing a relationship, not simply tapping into some static or cyclic cosmic force. It *matters* that we are accepting something from outside of us, instead of discovering something hidden inside us.

We have trouble today with the idea of historicity, and its close relative, incarnation. It's implausible--or worse, elitist. To say Jesus uniquely contained God is to say that we don't. To say the eastern shore of the Mediterrannean Sea is the Holy Land is to say that Connecticut isn't. To say that the Jews were chosen of God is to say that the rest of us weren't, originally, and even now are only chosen *through* that choice and not on our own. We have trouble accepting that God is God, and we aren't. However one reads the Bible, literally or metaphorically, that is the overriding message: only God is God.

Peace,
Mark Kille
John P. Webster Library

Hi Mark:

My recent understanding of the Moses story has been through movies and television so it was refreshing reading the original once again. What impressed me was that it was much more sophisticated than the Patriarch stories. The very name of God has changed from the Lord God whom Abraham believed in, or the God that Jacob heard talking. Yahweh or I AM WHO I AM seems to be molding the Israelites into a nation through adversity.

In a way it is much more about Yahweh than Moses, his mouthpiece. I couldn't decide whether God was trying to prove that he was stronger than the Egyptian god who was Pharaoh, or whether he was deliberately making Pharaoh act the way he did to make Moses' people want to leave and accept Moses' leadership. He leaves us with the impression that he, Yahweh, hardened Pharaoh's heart. This means he had the power to soften Pharaoh's heart, but didn't choose to do it.

This story has been a comfort to enslaved people all over the world and especially African slaves who were brought to America. What a delicious revenge on a cruel master. A dedicated leader comes and rescues a persecuted people from a wicked tyrant, and they were able to see the Red Sea cover over the pursuing soldiers and chief officials of that master.

But like most people who have been rescued, they quickly began to ask what have you done for me lately. They had exchanged the fleshpots of Egypt for starvation in the wilderness. It is clear that God is testing them just the way he had tested Pharaoh. I wonder how many stayed behind in Egypt or turned back or died on the trail. Before in the day of the Patriarchs, the lives of the ordinary followers were not changed dramatically. They hauled around their household gods and were glad when their leader told them they would one day be powerful if they obeyed their leader, but their lives didn' t change.

This time they were in such a perilous state that they wondered from day to day whether they could survive. Every day they had to decide whether they had thrown their lot in with the wrong god - could they trust him to take care of them. The next section of Exodus which we will read goes into that.

For those of you who are more versed in this kind of thing, what is the significance of the change from Lord God to Yahweh?

Nan

Please visit the First Church home page!