Prophetic Justice and Priestly Purity

The other day I had a very good conversation with a couple of seminarian friends. We spoke about prophets: people who call the community of faith to repentance from oppressive practices – often at some risk to their own security.

We remembered Paul Alexander, a Pentecostal professor and minister who addressed white supremacy and discrimination against gay people in a presidential address to the Society of Pentecostal Studies; he faces potential professional consequences for transgressing perceived scriptural norms for holiness. 

We remembered the long litany of Old Testament figures who punctured the self-indulgent religious certitudes of their day by their calls for mercy on the economically exploited and socially helpless. Their suffering is iconic.

  

We remembered Jesus, who was killed, at least in part, for his own transgressions of the holy: for consorting with imperial collaborators and peasant riffraff, for healing on the Sabbath, for eating with unwashed hands, for touching lepers and unclean women, and above all for speaking against the temple, upon which charge all the gospel accounts of his trial agree.

My friends and I reflected on the biblical taproot of the ethos on each side of these conflictual stories: on the one hand, the drive towards mercy that disregards the divider between holy and unholy and thinks only of provision, acceptance, and life for those threatened with privation, exclusion, and harm. And on the other, the tenacious drive towards moral purity that seeks to avoid pollutants and mirror God’s own holiness. I recalled that Walter Brueggemann had developed this contrast in his Theology of the Old Testament (Fortress, 1997), and I re-read his thoughts in the wake of this conversation.

He finds two trajectories following from Yahweh’s commands at Sinai, one aiming at social justice and the other at purity. Brueggemann’s treatment of the first social justice trajectory especially focuses on the jubilee prescriptions and other laws that seek to “perpetuate the Exodus community” by instituting “social practices in which the maintenance, dignity, security and well-being of every member of the community [is] guarded in concrete ways” (189). The second purity trajectory protects against disorder, cosmic and moral, particularly by mandating sacred space and time and ritual. Its concern is not only for law and order per se, but for nearness to Yahweh, the holy God:

the focus of this tradition of holiness…is that those zones of life that are inhabited by Yahweh in an intense way must be kept pure and uncontaminated…the great threat to holiness that can jeopardize the presence of Yahweh in the community of Israel is to create a disorder by mixing things in ways that confuse and distort. (192).  

Brueggemann makes a number of interesting observations about these two traditions. He suggests that they derive from different experiential bases: the tradition of debt cancellation from “the needs and experiences of the economically disadvantaged” and the tradition of holiness from those who “experience life as profoundly disordered” (190). The justice paradigm “concerns the political-economic life and urges drastic transformative and rehabilitative activity,” while the holiness paradigm “focuses on the cultic life of the community and seeks a restoration of lost holiness, whereby the presence of God can be counted on and enjoyed” (193). Even more provocatively, Brueggemann frames the difference of the two approaches as the difference between God for us and God for God’s own self (ibid.). Brueggemann envisions this as a profound tension in the very character of Yahweh, and one without abiding resolution in the Old Testament: a God ineluctably sovereign, and in solidarity.

Brueggemann does write that the New Testament moves towards a “complete identification of God’s power with God’s love,” especially in Jesus’ crucifixion, wherein “God’s own life embraces the abandonment of broken covenant” (311). He also approvingly cites Fernando Belo’s reading of the gospel of Mark that portrays Jesus as a champion of the justice trajectory whose “scorned opponents are advocates of the holiness tradition” (194).

Nonetheless, Brueggemann also recognizes that the New Testament doesn’t make such a clean break from the purity paradigm: the New Testament often affirms holiness commandments and takes up a concern for purity, with all their attendant proscriptions against toxins like lust and greed and debauchery. Jesus and his apostles advocate holiness. Furthermore, the imagery of blood atonement, drawn from the priestly worldview, is profoundly determinative for the NT authors’ understanding of Jesus’ death. 

Brueggemann also offers a theological defense of the holiness tradition: without its thorough theocentrism, the quest for justice can collapse into a merely political program. “The commands of justice, taken by themselves, easily become separated from the theological, Yahwistic matrix in which they are given to Israel” (ibid.). Even as his own more progressive position is firm, Brueggemann counsels sympathy for those on the conservative side of the churchly controversy over issues of same-sex marriage and ordination – given their scriptural sources for wariness against perceived moral uncleanness and disorder (195).

I remember once saying to a friend of mine here at seminary that I like liberals because their eyes are so full of humanity – all its pathos and problems. And I like conservatives because their eyes are so full of God. This same split  – and the intersection between  – lies deep in our Bible.

Our agonizing Bible

The Bible is a book of serial hopes. Always looking backwards to old memories of God’s mercy, it also faces forward to await new and greater works.

Judahites in and after the exile remembered David’s kingdom, and hoped for the restoration of his dynasty – but with even greater scope and peace. They remembered the exodus, and hoped for a new and even mightier deliverance and repatriation. They remembered the temple worship of old, and hoped for the resumption of even more spectacular and purer worship. They remembered the deep mercy of God on their unfaithful forebears, and hoped for a new and even deeper mercy.

Jesus’ followers remembered Moses and Elijah and David, and they hoped that Jesus would speak the word of God, work healing and justice, and reign over God’s people even more than his predecessors. Later, they remembered his resurrection appearances and hoped he would come again in even more lasting and universal glory – before their generation had ended. 

The Bible is also a book of serial disappointments.

The very reason Judahites had to hope anew for David’s kingship or another exodus or a purer temple was because all these institutions had been cataclysmically destroyed.

Newer instances of each hope proved heart-achingly incommensurate. When exiles returned to the land, no king was forthcoming. Prophecy would sputter and fall silent. Much later, potential new kings – messiahs – would be killed and shown false. The “restored” people after the “new exodus” would endure foreign occupation. The Second Temple was disappointing from the outset, and increasingly corrupt.

Jesus was killed.

Also, the resurrected Jesus did not come back as anticipated. The New Testament attests a stage of thinking only beginning to paper over and institutionalize this vast disappointment. I myself am not sure what to do with the fact that the chief expectation created by Jesus’ resurrection (namely, his imminent return) was misguided.

Interestingly, the serial experience of disappointment in the Bible resulted at each phase in a yet more radical hope. Hope sprang back after each occasion of its annihilation – in an even stronger form. The hopes at the end of the Bible are thus piercingly extreme: just last Sunday the lectionary featured Revelation 21:4 with its promise that “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.”

This means that the Bible at large – if it is possible to speak in such a way – addresses the median time: it rehearses God’s past mercy and hopes extravagantly for yet more. But the “present” of its purview is, inevitably, even formally, caught in the trough of disappointment. It speaks to people who know God’s past and want God’s grand future – that is, a people hurting with a piqued but unfulfilled desire. By definition, disappointed people.

    

This painful two-sidedness characterizes even Jesus’ miracles. Reading through Luke I have seen afresh how full of recollection these miracle stories are. Jesus raised the widow’s son, recalling Elijah who also raised a widow’s son; like Elijah again, Jesus healed the lepers; Jesus commanded the storm, similar to God’s stilling the sea in Psalm 107; Jesus miraculously fed the people in the wilderness, as God did in the exodus. At the same time, these stories are not ends in themselves, but rather open onto the future, heralding an even more encompassing salvation. Jesus’ own preaching announced that a decisive new time had come, for which his miraculous works served as harbingers. The people’s exclamation when Jesus raised the widow’s son – “God has looked favorably on his people!” (Luke 7) – marks a larger field of expectation, and not only amazement over this single act. Jesus’ raising of Jairus’ daughter from the sleep of death anticipates his role in a far grander resurrection to come.  But this dual character means the miracles are, in themselves, appetizing but not satiating. The same two-sidedness, commemorative and anticipatory, describes the subsequent deeds of the apostles in Acts, except now these also recall Jesus’ own miracles. Peter healed a beggar like Jesus (Acts 3), and raised a woman from death like Jesus (Acts 9).

Because of the Bible’s richly remembered past and promised future plenitude, our present experiences of God can only ever be partial and piquant – a token rather than a full meal, a glance rather than an embrace, a letter rather than a living voice. 

The Bible is an agonizing book.

James Cone Annihilates the Classical Doctrine of God

We’ve had Marx for quite a while now, telling us to attend to the connection between ideology and social place: a society’s dominant ideas support the interests of that society’s overclass. Marx has been around long enough for analyses of this symbiosis between ideas and material interests to broaden: plumbing for ideology must now also take into account race and gender as conditions at work on the plane of ideas.

    

The famous black theologian James Cone pioneered from the 1960s and onwards drawing attention to the cooption of (white) academic theology by white power interests. No example stands out more starkly in Cone’s catalogue of accusations against white American theology than its overwhelming silence in the face of ongoing black suffering. At its most horrific, white American theology sought outright to justify slavery, antebellum, and the oppression of black people, postbellum. But even in less obvious moments, white theologians’ disregard for the plight of black humanity amply bespeaks the captivity of their thinking to their social position. “Because white theologians were not enslaved and lynched and are not ghettoized because of their color, they do not think that color is an important point of departure for theological discourse” (God of the Oppressed, 49).

Cone doesn’t hold as a possibility that the long train of white American theologians believed the right doctrines but somehow didn’t follow through on their “practical” implications. Instead, he assumes that there must have been theological error upstream: white power interests self-protectively bent the truth of the gospel. Cone takes issue with traditional eschatology and Christology – faults them both, in different ways, for evacuating history as the site of God’s presence and action. For a paper I wrote at mid-term, I looked in greater detail at the critique Cone launches at the classical doctrine of God. His charge reaches far back beyond the racialized history of oppression in North America.

  

In brief, Cone asserts that it is no accident the Western theological tradition has favored a passive and ahistorical vision of God. It’s not hard to grasp Augustine’s or Aquinas’ view: divine perfection is total stillness, immobility, rest; a being undisturbed by the changeability of the created world, or even by successive acts of divine will. Cone only points out the social counterpart of this conception of God: a societal ethos equally committed to immobility, an “ethic of the status quo.” He writes:

Since the Church and its bishops (during the age of Constantine and thereafter) were not slaves, it did not occur to them that God’s revelation in Jesus Christ is identical with the presence of his Spirit in the slave community in struggle for the liberation of humanity. They viewed God in static terms and thus tended to overlook the political thrust of the gospel. This procedure was consistent with the God of Plotinus but not with the God of Moses and Amos. Consequently, the ethics of the fourth-century Fathers differed fundamentally from biblical revelation (ibid., 181).

Notably, Cone here connects this sociologically-determined theological error with a failure to reckon with the Bible. He says later that “theologians of the Christian Church have not interpreted Christian ethics as an act for the liberation of the oppressed because their views of divine revelation were defined by philosophy rather than by the biblical theme of God as the Liberator of the oppressed” (ibid., 183).

What does Cone then propose to replace the static and ahistorical god of classical Christianity? Cone finds rich biblical grounds for believing in God’s dynamic, active, and historical identity as liberator. In each of his major works, Cone forays into the Bible, particularly emphasizing its Old Testament witness. The Exodus is of great import, but so also the writing prophets of the 8^th century, and, of course, the earthly ministry of Jesus. Cone draws on then-current Old Testament theologian G.E. Wright and the “biblical theology movement” to insist on the historicity of God in his emancipatory interventions for the oppressed. This historicity is not accidental to God; Cone writes that “Yahweh’s very nature stands against the so-called mighty in their oppression of the poor” (ibid., 60). Cone believes that the biblical record is far more eloquent about God’s action in history than about God’s transcendence above it. In fact, Cone assigns only a propaedeutic and eliminative significance to divine transcendence: it rules out the deification of our own experiences (A Black Theology of Liberation, 81).

Many questions remain: perhaps the relation of a God passive towards history and a Christian history passive towards its underclasses needs more sophistication. Perhaps there are resources in the classical doctrine of God that would allay Cone’s suspicions towards it, and the entrenched oppressions of late antiquity, the medieval, and modern eras should be laid at the feet of a different ideological bulwark. Cone does not intend to provide a “fully fleshed out academic doctrine of God” to contrast with the traditional notion(s) – so how a more historicized God would fare against modern challenges aimed at his classical rival remains untested. Realistically, I am not sanguine about Cone’s discovery in the Bible of a Yahweh unconditionally committed to delivering the poor. Yahweh’s foremost commitment in the (Hebrew) Bible is to Israel. As Jon Levenson has pointed out, Yahweh did not deliver the poor of Egypt; nor did he deliver Israel on account of their poverty. He delivered Israel because of promises made to their ancestors. So also, Israel’s laws do not abolish class distinctions, even as they legislate mercy for the poor and stranger, and (relatively) clement slave laws. Yahweh’s (admittedly ambiguous) patronage of the monarchy also presents problems for a purely egalitarian interpretation of the Bible. What is on firmer biblical ground (and of great interest to me) is Cone’s retrieval of the historicity of God – a God active in the public sphere, dynamic, involved; not wholly exhausted, perhaps, by his revelations, but nonetheless, hardly sitting immovable in eternity and interacting with creation only through contemplation of it in his own ratio.  

What world did God love?

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

What world did God love?

Perhaps surprisingly, the answer has been contentious. Reformed theologians have exercised their ingenuity for hundreds of years seeking to limit the object of God’s love to a subset within the larger mass of humankind.

Last night, too, a friend of mine remarked at dinner that oftentimes when preachers use this verse to spur listeners on towards evangelistic endeavor, “the world” connotes people and circumstances somehow distant and over-against: “out there,” “over there” – not “here.” Maybe it’s easier to imagine God’s love – itself somewhat abstract – doing its abstract thing with abstract people out there at some remove from the ragged concreteness and confusion of our own place.  

Princeton Seminary has made me more “worldly.” Most human beings don’t have the luxury of dedicating themselves to esoteric “spiritual” concerns. Real threats and pervasive struggles hem them in: poverty, oppression, displacement, war, stigma. But some of us have to work our way backwards out of theological conditioning that blunts the size and sharpness of these human realities. Tragically, in some Christian communities and discourses, “spiritual” pursuits do not serve to slingshot their practitioners back into the “world” – but rather eclipse this world; and tamp down empathy for its wounds.

To be sure, Christians will be characterized by a faith which our neighbors do not share: a distinctive memory of God’s mercy and a pointed hope in God’s future that organize our loyalties in an irreducibly vertical direction. Jesus’ answer to the question about the greatest commandment was twofold. But its twin sides do not compete: and in fact, the plane upon which Jesus himself enacted the greatest commandment was pervasively human – “worldly.” We are given no treatise detailing the mystical ascent of Jesus’ soul or the involutions of his piety. We have instead accounts of people coming to him with very plain, universally intelligible problems: sickness, exclusion, shame, death. The Bible as a whole aches with pains that are common to humans of every time – poverty, oppression, displacement, war, stigma. Its difference from any other literature is not at the level of its sufferings, but in the particular story it tells of God’s involvement in healing.

I remembered this today as I read an op-ed about Chechen refugees – a diaspora of many thousands who fled from a small, mountainous country whose struggle for independence from a foreign power now stretches over a century. The last decades alone have visited their homeland with untold devastation. Their welcome in the west has also been tenuous because of their Islamic faith. Extremist factions from amongst them have perpetrated acts of guerilla terror. 

It remains to be seen what the motive was for the recent violence committed by two Chechan brothers in Boston. But I couldn’t help think this morning that as I read the opening of Luke’s gospel, it was describing the same world as has blared across our headlines these past days. I watched a couple living under an aggressive foreign power, dwelling displaced and distant from their Judaean hometown; jumping anxiously to fulfill an imperial edict despite the terrible timing with their pregnancy; and needing to stay in very second-rate lodgings, helpless to achieve better. I heard the angel announce a coming king, marking his significance by naming the memory of his long-dead ancestor from an age of national independence and glory; I listened to a young woman sing a hymn eagerly anticipating God's destruction of the powerful rich and vindication of the poor. I felt the shock of men from a suspect underclass as angels told them – even them! – good news about a Savior. These were straits that bred terrorists amongst Jesus’ peers – Theudas and Judas the Galilean and others (Acts 5:36ff).

I saw afresh that this is the world into which God sent his Son. This is the world that God loved.       

Uncooperative Bodies

Famously, St Augustine thought that before the Fall, the “male member” would have been subject to the will just like another limb.

Do we not move our feet and hands when we will to do the things we would by means of these members? Do we meet with no resistance in them, but perceive that they are ready servants of the will? …and shall we not believe that, like as all those members obediently serve the will, so also should the members have discharged the function of generation, though lust, the award of disobedience, had been awanting? … The field of generation should have been sown by the organ created for this purpose, as the earth is sown by the hand (City of God, XIV: 23).

Now, however, the chain of command has been broken. The body rebels against its ostensible commander, the will, whether by dereliction of duty or by jumping the gun. The will and body quarrel.

Besides being sort of comical, St Augustine indicates by this example what the ideal relationship of will to body would be: total control. He admits that this is unattainable in this life; the body will always remain somewhat insubordinate. But practically, Christians ought to strive for as much control over their compulsions as possible. The unification of St Augustine’s own divided will is the major conversion event in Confessions.

I recently picked up Martha Nussbaum’s book Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. It’s about education, but in it she lays out in miniature form her famous views of human development and disgust. She, too, treats of the myth of total control, bodily omnipotence. She argues that we humans have a primordial shame from the time of infanthood: we are helpless then even to coordinate the movement of our limbs, let alone command the world in accordance with our will. Disgust follows this primitive shame. We grow a revulsion for our bodily emissions because they remind us of our animality – that is, all the ways our own bodies continually elude governance. What is most interesting to me about Nussbaum’s account is its political consequence: our anxieties about the body figure our anxieties about society. As the “body politic,” we struggle to gain hegemony over recalcitrant outliers. And we project animality and hence disgust onto them (women, blacks, Jews, gays, etc).

But Nussbaum believes things can proceed otherwise. She sees our bodily helplessness as an opportunity: “This aspect of human life is not to be hated and repudiated, but addressed by reciprocity and mutual aid…cognizance of that weakness makes us sociable and turns us to humanity.” (34). Sympathetic recognition of others’ vulnerable humanity is a basic ingredient of a functional and inclusive democracy.

I am impressed that, in effect, Nussbaum makes the question of self-control and democracy coterminous. How we respond to the uncooperative “otherness” of our own bodies somehow parallels how we ought to respond to societal “others.” Certainly Nussbaum’s concern is far more for the latter issue. I share that interest, but I also wish I had a more fleshed-out (pun intended) alternative to St Augustine’s ideal of omnipotence over the body. The biblical witness presses me to consider self-governance as a goal to be striven for. Just this morning I read 1 Peter. “Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from fleshly lusts that wage war against the soul” (2:11 NRSV, ominously preceding the directives to obey all earthly authorities). Carol Newsom of Emory University recently published an article on the models of the moral self in the Hebrew Bible (Journal of Biblical Literature 131.1, 2012). Drawing on work in current anthropology, she found that Hebrew Bible posits “the heart” as an executive self, overridden occasionally by the Spirit of God, but otherwise managing other impulses. “Desire is not in and of itself negative, but, unless informed and disciplined, it is unruly and untrustworthy as a guide to moral conduct” (12). Her examples par excellence? The dangerous desires of the first Genesis narratives. 

What, then, is a version of self-control that wouldn’t regret our bodies’ independence and uncooperativeness?

This is a very live question! Not only with regard to unasked-for sexual responses, but to lots of other sensuous passions that receive deep suspicion in the Christian tradition. How are we to respond to our own unbidden anger or jealousy or grief in a way that doesn’t merely shut them down but respects their integrity – while also denying them tyranny over our conduct? Is this democracy rather than a monarchy of the human person envisioned (or even permitted) by the Bible?    

People Die; Gods Don't

For my Ugaritic class, we have been translating through the Kirta Epic: a cuneiform story found in the house of the ancient city’s high priest, it tells the saga of a semi-divine king on a quest for a wife. Towards the end in tablet 16, the old king, Kirta, is dying. He lifts up his voice to his father Ilu the high god (cognate with Old Testament El). He tells Ilu that “in your life, our father, I rejoice / in your not-dying we jubilate” (lines 14b, 15; my translation).  A little later, perhaps a different voice, maybe Kirta’s son, speaks up to ask incredulously, “So, father, shall you die like mortals? … How can it be said that [Kirta] is a son of [Ilu], Progeny of the Beneficent and Holy One? So can gods die, the Beneficent’s progeny not live?” (lines 20-23; translation by Mark Smith).

The “not-dying” of line 15 is as grammatically klutzy in the original Ugaritic as in English – but its awkwardness highlighted for me what is the most important and agonizing difference between divine beings and humans on the conception of the Ugaritic poet: mortality. Gods do not die. Humans do. I was caught off guard by the pathos of these two contraposed facts in the prayers of the ancient epic.

I was also impressed with the radicalism of this concept: of “not-dying.” Simply put, as an observable characteristic of human life, it is non-existent. Every person that has ever lived has died. And so as a notion, “not-dying” constitutes an incredible imaginative feat, a leap from the uniform script of experience, and one of deep and abiding cultural power. I do personally believe in an everlasting God – but from the perspective of the history of religions, this concept arose in definite times and places in the ancient world (probably beyond precise location). What an explosive and tantalizing idea! And what a run it has had! For example, as I have read through Augustine this semester, I have seen anew how profoundly mortality troubled him – and how the idea of an impermeable god, a being absolutely sealed off from vicissitude, saved him. This problem (change: death) and this solution (divine immutability: immortality) also occupied many or most other church fathers, in part because of their debt to Neoplatonism.

The Old Testament shares belief in divine immortality with its predecessors at Ugarit and with its cognate cultures. Various texts celebrate the durability of God’s life. Habakkuk 1:12 says, “Are you not from of old, O Yhwh my God, my holy one? You shall not die.” Psalms frequently contrast human transience with God’s eternality, often as a rhetorical means of motivating God to preserve them from harm (The idea seems to be, I only last a little while and you, always, so give me a chance, what can it hurt): “My days pass away like a shadow, and I wither like the grass. But you, O Yhwh, endure forever, and your name from age to age” (Ps 102:11, 12).

I haven’t searched out all the occasions when the Old Testament mentions divine immortality. But it generally affirms the difference between humans that die and gods who don’t (though cf Ps 82 for an example of Yhwh demoting other gods to mortality for failing to do justice). Yhwh and his retinue in the garden fear that the first humans will complete their half-way transformation into gods by also eating from the tree of life, thereby adding eternal life to the knowledge of good and evil attained through their first transgression (Gen 3:22). But the Old Testament’s attitude towards human mortality and divine eternality seems to differ from that of its neighbors and later interpreters. Yes, the psalmists beg for a lease on life – but they do not, on the whole, agonize over the larger fact of human death. Rather, they celebrate Yhwh’s fidelity to successive generations of Israel – itself a staggering thing to consider: that one could worship and know the selfsame being as one’s long-dead ancestors used to! Yes, Ecclesiastes meditates long and hard on human ephemerality – but in the end, accepts rather than protests against it. Maybe I’m just not thinking of some examples, but on the whole, I don’t hear in the Old Testament the same covetousness for everlasting life that produces such pathos in the Kirta Epic or in Greek philosophy (and its Christian receptions).

I don’t yet know if this is really true – and certainly not why, either historically or theologically. I’m also not really sure what to do with that datum: that the bulk of the literature Christians acknowledge as sacred does not presume or seek human immortality, even as it recognizes and loves divine durability. Or, furthermore, that when belief in a postmortem human existence firmed up in Israel, it derived from prior faith in God’s restoration of Israel as a community. That is, belief in individual resurrection was the byproduct of belief in national resurrection. Some of the same collective logic drives our Christian confidence that Jesus’ own personal resurrection from the dead somehow also includes and impacts the community of those united to him. The problem of individual immortality per se is of peripheral interest in the Bible. In the summer after my first year in seminary, I tried to negotiate this issue in a paper on some Old Testament passages such as Isaiah 65:17-25. These texts assume human mortality as an ongoing aspect of the eschatologically restored life. I wanted to know how Christian interpreters across the ages had read these scriptures from our vantage point after Jesus’ resurrection. I came to no definite resolution. I guess all this to say, these remain topics on my agenda for exploration: the specific history of revolutionary god-concepts such as “not-dying,” the meaning of the Old Testament’s pervasive this-worldliness, and the challenge of reading its testimony together with that of the New.                      

People Have Disliked the Old Testament for a Very Long Time

This weekend I’ve done some reading for a paper I need to write – comparing and contrasting St. Augustine’s defense of the Old Testament against the Manichaeans with that of his older contemporary, St. Epiphanius of Salamis. (Manichaeism, by the way, was an immensely popular sect founded in the 3^rd century CE by the prophet Mani, who taught a basic cosmic dualism: matter is evil and created by the evil god, and the spiritual world is good and created by the good god.) 

   

What makes this interesting? In brief: the fact that the objections raised by Manichaeans to the Old Testament over 1600 years ago remain so very live today, both inside and outside the Christian church.

For example, St. Epiphanius in his massive work Panarion (Brill, 1994) specifies a number of accusations Mani had against the OT. Mani's most basic thesis was that the testaments contradict: “the god who spoke in the Law is different from the God of the Gospel” (260), and in fact, according to him, is the “archon (ruler) of darkness.” More specifically, Mani accused the OT god of inciting “lust” and covetousness by ordering the Hebrews to despoil their Egyptian neighbors (290); he expelled the Canaanites from their land (302); he made one destructive act lead to another by mandating animal sacrifices as a response to wrongdoing on the human plane (290). Mani also found the OT differing from the NT in other regards: the OT idealizes material prosperity and the NT, poverty of spirit (300). The OT commands Sabbath keeping, and the NT abrogates it (301).

The Manichaean named Faustus against whom St. Augustine contended also rejected the Old Testament. He found that it was basically alien to him – a document written for a wholly different, ethnic people (Bk 4). Besides that, its concerns are wholly fleshly, carnal, unlike and unrelated to his own spiritual aspirations. Faustus furthermore charged the “orthodox” with rejecting the OT as much as he does, just covertly: his words are worth quoting at length, simply because of their contemporary resonance:

You ask if I believe the Old Testament. Of course not, for I do not keep its precepts. Neither, I imagine, do you. I reject circumcision as disgusting; and if I mistake not, so do you. I reject the observance of Sabbaths as superfluous: I suppose you do the same. I reject sacrifice as idolatry, as doubtless you also do. Swine's flesh is not the only flesh I abstain from [Manichaeans were vegetarians]; nor is it the only flesh you eat. I think all flesh unclean: you think none unclean. Both alike, in these opinions, throw over the Old Testament. We both look upon the weeks of unleavened bread and the feast of tabernacles as unnecessary and useless. Not to patch linen garments with purple; to count it adultery to make a garment of linen and wool; to call it sacrilege to yoke together an ox and an ass when necessary; not to appoint as priest a bald man, or a man with red hair, or any similar peculiarity, as being unclean in the sight of God, are things which we both despise and laugh at, and rank as of neither first nor second importance; and yet they are all precepts and judgments of the Old Testament. You cannot blame me for rejecting the Old Testament; for whether it is right or wrong to do so, you do it as much as I. As for the difference between your faith and mine, it is this, that while you choose to act deceitfully, and meanly to praise in words what in your heart you hate, I, not having learned the art of deception, frankly declare that I hate both these abominable precepts and their authors (Bk 6; cf also Bk 32).

Faustus also dismissed the idea that the OT predicts Christ (Bk 12); he was revolted by the morality of the OT stories, quoting a whole chain, e.g., Abraham’s concubinage and lying, Lot’s incest, the strife and deceit of the Jacob story, Judah’s incest, David’s adultery and murder, Solomon’s extreme polygamy, Hosea’s marriage to a prostitute, Moses’ murder, the despoiling of Egypt and the conquest (Bk 22). Faustus also attributed a host of indecent human motives to the OT god:

These books, moreover, contain shocking calumnies against God himself. We are told that he existed from eternity in darkness, and admired the light when he saw it; that he was so ignorant of the future, that he gave Adam a command, not foreseeing that it would be broken; that his perception was so limited that he could not see Adam when, from the knowledge of his nakedness, he hid himself in a corner of Paradise; that envy made him afraid lest his creature man should taste of the tree of life, and live for ever; that afterwards he was greedy for blood, and fat from all kinds of sacrifices, and jealous if they were offered to any one but himself; that he was enraged sometimes against his enemies, sometimes against his friends; that he destroyed thousands of men for a slight offense, or for nothing; that he threatened to come with a sword and spare nobody, righteous or wicked. The authors of such bold libels against God might very well slander the men of God. You must join with us in laying the blame on the writers if you wish to vindicate the prophets (Bk 22).

All of this to say, many if not most people in pews today, let alone outside the church, share some of these concerns with ancient heretics. If nothing else, this fact says that the resolutions proposed by such churchly heroes as St Augustine and St Epiphanius are a) unknown or b) unsuccessful. The reason I am trawling through this stuff is to see if these fathers have anything interesting to say about these perennial problems (oddly enough, these aren’t the issues professional study of the Old Testament prepares one to address; this is a function of the discipline's pervasive historicism).

     

The two saints go in different directions in their responses – direction followed in various ways by their contemporary, confessional descendants. St Epiphanius defends the legitimacy of the OT on the basis of Jesus’ own words about OT figures like Abraham and Moses and the prophets, or Jesus’ zeal for the temple. But in a couple places he develops a theory we would now call progressive revelation: in describing the Old Testament, he uses an extended metaphor of light. If Enoch and Abel are a spark, Noah and Abraham and Moses a lamp, Jesus Christ is the Great Light (283). Similarly, in the matter of sacrifices, God was weaning his people off the polytheism with which they were familiar in Egypt: they were used to offering sacrifices, so God first redirected and limited their offerings, to him alone. Later he would criticize the practice of sacrifices (as in Ps 49 or Is 1:12) and inculcate the belief that true sacrifice was that of contrition and praise. The same process applied to kingship (291).

St. Augustine has no such developmentalism. Instead, he construes the OT as a very symbolic book: he reads complex allegorical meanings from both the seemingly material (“carnal”) promises of the OT as well as its “outward” religious precepts. He grounds the legitimacy of the OT not so much in the words of Jesus as in St Paul's opinion, which he cites repeatedly (esp Romans 15:4, see below). St. Augustine holds that the OT saints grasped the spiritual (New Testament) significance of the promises and precepts in their own day – though perhaps the majority of the people did not, and only operated on the misleading “carnal” surface of their religion. I’ll let him explain himself in a longer but exemplary quote:

Since the Old Testament teaches us that the things now revealed were so long ago prefigured, that we may be firm and faithful in our adherence to them, it would be blasphemy and impiety to discard these books, simply because the Lord requires of us now not a literal, but a spiritual and intelligent regard to their contents. They were written, as the apostle says, for our admonition, on whom the end of the world is come. “For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.” Not to eat unleavened bread in the appointed seven days was a sin in the time of the Old Testament; in the time of the New Testament it is not a sin. But having the hope of a future world through Christ, who makes us altogether new by clothing our souls with righteousness and our bodies with immortality, to believe that the bondage and infirmity of our original corruption will prevail over us or over our actions, must continue to be a sin, till the seven days of the course of time are accomplished. In the time of the Old Testament, this, under the disguise of a type, was perceived by some saints. In the time of the New Testament it is fully declared and publicly preached. What was then a precept of Scripture is now a testimony. Formerly, not to keep the feast of tabernacles was a sin, which is not the case now. But not to form part of the building of God's tabernacle, which is the Church, is always a sin. Formerly this was acted in a figure; now the record serves as testimony. The ancient tabernacle, indeed, would not have been called the tabernacle of the testimony, unless as an appropriate symbol it had borne testimony to some truth which was to be revealed in its own time. To patch linen garments with purple, or to wear a garment of woollen and linen together, is not a sin now. But to live intemperately, and to wish to combine opposite modes of life,-as when a woman devoted to religion wears the ornaments of married women, or when one who has not abstained from marriage dresses like a virgin,-is always sin. So it is sin whenever inconsistent things are combined in any man's life. This, which is now a moral truth, was then symbolized in dress. What was then a type is now revealed truth. So the same Scripture which then required symbolical actions, now testifies to the things signified.” (Bk 6)