Committed Critic

This post is adapted from a sermon that I gave at Brookline Church of Christ this past Sunday, August 9.

The lectionary text was John 6:35-51:

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever has faith in me will never be thirsty. But I said of you that you’ve seen me but don’t have faith. The ones that my Father gives me––all of them come to me, and I’ll never cast away a person who comes to me.

You see, I’ve come down from heaven to do not my own will, but the will of the one who sent me––and this is the will of the one who sent me: not to lose for him anything that he’s given me, but to raise it up on the last day. That is, this is the will of my Father: that whoever sees the Son and has faith in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise that person up on the last day.”

Then the Judeans started to grumble about him because he had said, “I am the bread that came down out of heaven.” They said, “Isn’t this Jesus the son of Joseph? Don’t we know his father and mother? How can he tell us now, ‘I’ve come down out of heaven’?”

Jesus answered them, “Don’t grumble among yourselves!”

“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets: they all shall be taught by God. Everyone who hears from the Father, and learns, comes to me. But of course, no one has seen the Father except the one who is from the Father––that is the one who has seen the Father.

Truly I tell you, whoever has faith has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and died; but this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one who eats it will not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If someone eats from this bread, she will live forever. The bread that I give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

The last line, where Jesus’ flesh is given as bread “for the life of the world,” highlights the rocky relationship in John’s Gospel between Jesus and the world that will be the topic of this post.

To help clarify the discussion, I want to start out with a sketch of John’s view of the cosmos. It’s helpful if you imagine it visually:

John’s Cosmos
Below is the world, created by God but now a dark place, under the control of evil powers. Above is the realm of the Father, where truth and light reign. Jesus, then, is on a sort of a mission: he is from the Father, but he is sent here, into the world, to bring the light and truth from the Father into the dark world, more or less behind enemy lines.

Like lots of stories, John’s has good guys and bad guys. Most of the dark world rejects Jesus and kills him. But some of the people in the world see the truth when they see Christ, and they have faith. These people remain in Christ even as Christ returns to the Father, leaving the Counselor behind. The promise is that Christ will prepare a place for us, then return to the world a second time and raise us up on the last day to take us with him to the Father.

John on the World
Now, some specific passages. Some of the Jesus’ words about the world in John seem very positive:

John 3:16-17: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who has faith in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but in order for the world to be saved through him.”

This is very good news for the world. God loved the world. Not just certain individuals, but the world. Jesus didn’t come to judge or condemn the world, but to save the world.

Yet God’s love for the world doesn’t preclude condemnation for people in the world. For example, John 12:47-48:

If anyone hears my words and doesn’t keep them, I am not the one who judges him; for I didn’t come to judge the world, but to save the world. Yet the one who rejects me and doesn’t receive my words has a judge: the word that I spoke will judge him on the last day.

Jesus is saying that his office isn’t to judge, at least not during his first coming. Rather, the truth is something fixed, revealed by Christ, and people effectively judge themselves by whether they accept it. So the message of good news for the world includes also a message of judgment. Jesus came to save the world, but people in the world who reject him are still condemned.

Then later in the Gospel, Jesus has harsher things to say about the world (NRSV):

If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you don’t belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world––therefore the world hates you (15:18-19).

In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world! (16:33).

Anti-Worldly?
Depending on how you read these passages, it’s easy to end up with a world that people need to be saved from, rather than a world that Jesus came to save. If we’re not careful, we could jump to the conclusion that Jesus is opposed to the created world. At one point in John 6 Jesus says, “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless” (6:63). The book of 1 John, which seems to be written for the same church as the Gospel of John, but at a later date, suggests that this church has actually split from other Christians who deny that Jesus came in the flesh. Apparently they thought that human flesh was unseemly, such that Jesus wouldn’t want to have any part of it. The second century saw an explosion of groups with these kind of beliefs, often called Gnostics. Many Gnostics thought the world wasn’t created by God at all but was actually a horrible mistake, created by demons. And some of the Gnostics seem to have liked the Gospel of John.

Even people who affirm that God created a good world can be drawn into an attitude that flesh is basically evil. For example, we could assume that human lives aren’t very important, because our souls are the only part that will survive. Or that we don’t have to take care of the world, because it’ll be burned up when Christ returns. Or perhaps most likely, we may simply denigrate the world and the bodies God has given us, which are an extraordinary gift. It’s possible, by trying to be more “spiritual,” for us to ignore whatever is physical to the point of ingratitude toward God.

Affirmation of the world
So we have this Gospel that in some ways is very other-worldly. But it is in this same story of John’s Gospel that God becomes very much a part of this world, because John also says that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. It would seem that that moment changed everything. Christians have long affirmed that once Jesus became flesh, flesh could not longer be dismissed at sinful or dirty. God became a part of the world of matter, a person made of dirt, like the rest of us.

When Jesus, the Word, offered his flesh up to death, he became the bread of life: in his teaching, in the crucifixion, and in the Lord’s Supper. As the lectionary reading tells us, Jesus said that “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (6:51). And as he will tell us later in the chapter, his flesh is real food, and his blood is real drink.

So even if the earth isn’t permanent, while it’s here Christ becomes a part of this world for our sake. One of the inspirations for this sermon is a book by a Greek Orthodox priest called For the Life of the World. The author says that the Greek Orthodox church understands all of creation as a sacrament by which God gives us his grace. What that means is that the life that Christ gives us is a life we live in this world. Because of that, we don’t need to be saved from the world itself––not from our bodies, not from the creation around us. This is God’s world, first and foremost, and it’s a gift given to us. Our life will continue eternally with God, but on this earth our life still embraces creation.

Saved from the world
But there’s another side. Christ came to save the world, and he did it because the world is lost. The world is still a dark place, and we still need a savior who is bigger than its boundaries. There are false voices in the world that want to deceive us.

Most everyone agree that there are false voices in the world––politicians, marketers, preachers, theologians, philosophers––we just tend to disagree on which voices are false. 1 John has a guideline for deterining which is which, a passage I alluded to earlier: “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God” (1 John 4:2).

We don’t just accept this uncritically, of course. Some people confess Christ and spout lies, and non-Christians often say things that are true and that should command Christians’ attention. And we also have to admit that the even the faithful followers of Christ we love and admire––and of course we ourselves––have our own falsehood mixed in with the truth.

But when we’re considering what the truth is, John does give us a very clear standard to start with, and that’s Jesus Christ. We’re too much a part of this world to be able to save ourselves from it, so we can’t just turn to our own ideas, or whatever we can derive from reason. Christ is the one who came into this dark world and spoke light.

We also have to avoid following just the idea of Christ, or a purely spiritual Christ, which is what the group who left John’s church seems to have taught. Instead, we follow the actual risen Jesus Christ, the word who became flesh and walked among us. And that Christ, who saves us from the world, also leaves us here to live in our flesh in this world. And he remains here with us in the flesh––the flesh that he gave for the life of the world, which is real food, and which Christians share at communion every Sunday. It is at the communion table where the body of Christ (the church) encounters the body of Christ (the bread). There is a sort of nexus between heaven and earth, where Christ’s flesh is present among us here in the world, even as we gather at the foot of God’s throne with all the saints of heaven.

John’s Gospel doesn’t tell us everything we need for our Christian lives––it is famously short on moral teachings, for example––but the book is acutely clear on another point: when we’re looking for truth, Jesus is our starting point. The bread of life that nourishes us is truth, come from heaven down to this world for us. And the place we start is each week at the table of Communion, where Christ gives to us his flesh for the life of the world.

The communion table is the center of our Christian worship, because it is something the God gives to us––lest we get confused and think that the songs and prayers we offer to God are the most important things that happen on Sundays. It is this worship that drives our lives as Christians. The communion table is where we meet him in the flesh, to give us life for our time in this world.

Not all theological interpretations of texts are sympathetic. When John 1 reapplies and reinterprets the creation story, it does so with clear respect for the original text. Gnostic literature, in contrast, sometimes uses theological traditions in ways that intentionally undermine the original text.

A short, fascinating Gnostic text called The Hypostasis of the Archons creatively retells the story of the first six chapters of Genesis so as to undermine most of its theological claims.

OVERVIEW OF GNOSTICISM

The term Gnosticism is used by modern scholars to describe a cluster of beliefs held by a number of Christians (as well as some non-Christians) beginning probably in the second century A.D. Though their teachings weren’t uniform, the general idea behind Gnosticism is that the created world is not “very good” (as Genesis describes it) but instead a horrible mistake perpetrated by an inferior god who perhaps didn’t know any better.

Gnostics often still worshipped Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but the god of Israel was a different god, or rather a demigod, to be blamed for the flawed world we see around us. Clearly this perspective is blasphemous from an orthodox Christian perspective, and many people (understandably) were and are offended by it.

The true God, according to a typical Gnostic understanding, still interacts with the creation, but he does so by inviting “spiritual” people to gain a special knowledge (the Greek word is gnosis) by which they are freed from worldly existence. Humans are portrayed as originally spiritual beings from above who have been trapped in carnal bodies, and the goal of salvation is to free us from our worldly (read: defiled) existence so that we can return to the realm of light from which we came. Often, only a select group of humans indeed belongs to that other realm, to which they can escape via knowledge and be saved.

HYPOSTASIS OF THE ARCHONS

The Hypostasis of the Archons is perhaps better translated, “The [True] Nature of the Rulers.” It takes the word for “rulers” from Ephesians 6:12’s claim that the Christian battle is not against flesh and blood but against “rulers,” which Hypostasis purports to explain the true nature of. Audaciously, it claims that the creator god described in the Hebrew Scriptures is actually a group of rulers (”archons”) whom Scripture erroneously equates with the Father of Jesus Christ. For those scoring along at home, the author just used Paul’s statement in Ephesians to turn Christianity against the god of Israel.

The interpretive coup is pulled off through a variety of creative rewrites of the Genesis story. (Although the text uses a variety of names for both the greater and the lesser gods, for the sake of simplicity I’ll refer to them as “God” and “archons,” respectively.) The positive actions attributed in Genesis to the god of Israel are either reattributed to the (higher) Gnostic God, or are reevaluated as wicked or harmful actions.

When God looks down upon the earth, the archons see his reflection in the water and try to make a man in his image. They more or less accomplish the task but are unable to breathe a real spirit into the man; the man therefore lies on the ground until God consents to breathe a spirit into him.

Later, the archons place the man and woman in the garden and instruct them not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In this telling of the story, withholding that knowledge from them is a bad thing, but God overcomes their mistake by leading the snake to trick the woman into eating the fruit; thus what Christians deem the “fall” is the Gnostic God’s will from the start.

When the man and woman realize their nakedness, the head archon comes and asks “Adam! Where are you?”, not to see what Adam would say (as in common Christian interpretation) but because “he did not understand what had happened.”

For the curse that accompanies the “fall,” the archons then proceed to “[throw] mankind into great distraction and into a life of toil, so that their mankind might be occupied by worldly affairs, and might not have the opportunity of being devoted to the holy spirit.”

The story is more complex than I let on here, but it is evident that the author uses a retelling of the Genesis story (1) to distinguish the Father of Jesus Christ from the god of Israel and (2) to characterize the god of Israel as a sort of envious, arrogant, bumbling idiot.

This leads us to the creation story, which is explained near the end of the text. “Sophia” here is a name for one of the true gods (as is “the entirety”), and this excerpt (quoted from Robinson’s Nag Hammadi Library) describes how Sophia creates and interacts with the demigod (”Samael”) who corresponds to the creator in the Genesis story:

“Sophia, who is called Pistis, wanted to create something, alone without her consort; and her product was a celestial thing.A veil exists between the world above and the realms that are below; and shadow came into being beneath the veil; and that shadow became matter; and that shadow was projected apart. And what she had created became a product in the matter, like an aborted fetus. And it assumed a plastic form molded out of shadow, and became an arrogant beast resembling a lion.” It was androgynous, as I have already said, because it was from matter that it derived.

“Opening his eyes he saw a vast quantity of matter without limit; and he became arrogant, saying, ‘It is I who am God, and there is none other apart from me.’

“When he said this, he sinned against the entirety. And a voice came forth from above the realm of absolute power, saying, ‘You are mistaken, Samael’ –– which is, ‘god of the blind.’

“And he said, ‘If any other thing exists before me, let it become visible to me!’ And immediately Sophia stretched forth her finger and introduced light into matter; and she pursued it down to the region of chaos. And she returned up [to] her light…

This ruler, by being androgynous, made himself a vast realm, an extent without limit. And he contemplated creating offspring for himself, and created for himself seven offspring, androgynous just like their parent.

“And he said to his offspring, ‘It is I who am the god of the entirety.’”

Not all the points of this text are clear; however, the key point I want to draw attention to is the story’s equivalent to “Let there be light” of Genesis 1.

In this Gnostic retelling of creation, the words of the God of Israel at this point do not accomplish the creative task ascribed to them in Genesis. Rather, the would-be creator god Samael is portrayed as a blind demigod groping about in the dark, who asks for light because he is unable to see without it. It is the higher god Sophia, not Samael, who stretches out her finger and creates the light. Samael apparently has some control over the matter that lays before him, but he lacks the knowledge that only Sophia (the Greek word for “wisdom”) can provide.

CONSEQUENCES FOR CHRISTIAN THOUGHT AND ACTION

As I noted in my post on John 1 (10/28/06), Gnostic texts such as this one mounted a direct challenge to what became known as orthodox Christian beliefs. At stake, for example, are (1) the goodness of the created world, (2) the continuity between the God of Israel and the God of Jesus Christ, and (3) bodily salvation and resurrection.

All three of these points have been questioned at times in Christian history, but all three ultimately have “prevailed” in the minds of most believers––with important consequences for Christian living:

• Because the world God created is indeed good, we are compelled to respect both the world itself and the lives of people who live in it. Thus destruction of the environment is an affront to something beautiful God created, and poverty is a genuine evil even though this life is only temporary.
• Because the God who created the world is also the God of Jesus Christ, we affirm our connection with and dependence on the faith of the Jews as the root of our own. We affirm the Hebrew Scriptures as the word of God, and we respect Jews as worshipping that same God.
• Because we affirm that salvation applies to the whole person––body, soul, and spirit––we respect both our bodies and those of other people, and we conduct ourselves, e.g., sexually, in the belief that God has given us bodies with which to glorify him.

In conclusion I’ll note the obvious, that what we believe about God affects our lives, and that there are reasons the Church historically has affirmed some views of God and rejected others.

In the wake of the over-sensationalized (though genuinely interesting) Gnostic Gospel of Judas, when many people who are repelled by orthodox Christianity look about for alternative traditions that appeal more to their own sensibilities, it is worth looking carefully at the points that truly were at stake. Granting that the kind of Gnostic thought represented in Hypostasis is more extreme than some other ideas that were also rejected as heresy, nevertheless we should bear in mind that the differences under dispute were important.

Furthermore, the decisions made regarding canon, orthodoxy and heterodoxy were not mere power plays by those wishing to maintain their own influence, but were governed by convictions that in many cases were established from the very beginning of Christian thought.

Some of my favorite theological texts are those that exhibit a phenomenon called “intertextuality”: the use of one story or text within another, often with the result of tweaking (or outright changing) the older text’s meaning to make a theological point. Intertextuality can consist of quotations, allusions, or both.

The interesting task, as Richard B. Hays argues, is digging into how the one text uses the other as a part of a sort of stream of ideas, which often includes so-called “echoes” of meaning that lie in the interation between the two (or more) texts. The world’s best literature, in my opinion, uses intertextual references to other stories or ideas that are obvious enough for us to recognize but subtle enough to delight us when we unravel all their implications.

A good example of intertextuality in Scripture is Romans 7, which I described under my previous post (10/18/06). Paul seems to use the story of the temptation of the man and the woman in the garden to demonstrate how Sin uses the Law to lead us to death. That interpretation is rather subtle as these things go, and in fact we may even have conjured up a meaning for it not intended by Paul. However, there are far more obvious passages, especially those that include direct quotes from OT texts. In the case of Romans 7, my argument has in its favor that Paul has already brought up the story of Adam’s transgression (in Romans 5), which makes it far more likely that he had that story in mind in Romans 7 as well.

In any event, some of the scriptural and theological texts that I find most striking are those that refer intertextually to the creation story in Genesis 1, especially to the creative proclamation “Let there be light.” Today I want to begin a series of posts reflecting on some of these, how they fit together, and why I find them interesting or even moving.

I’ll begin with the best-known example of Christian theological reflection on the creation story. The allusion is almost unmistakable because the book begins with same two words (3 words in English) as the Greek Old Testament:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was god. He was with God in the beginning. Through him, everything came about––indeed, without him not one thing which has come about came about. In him was life, and the life was the light of humanity. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has no hold of it.There was a human, sent from God, named John. He came for testimony, in order to testify about the light, so that all would believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify about the light.

The true light, which enlightens all humanity, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world had come about through him, and yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and yet his own did not receive him. But for whoever did receive him, he gave to them––to those who believed in his name––authority to become children of God: those born not of blood or of the will of flesh or of the will of a man, but born of God.

And the word became flesh and dwelled among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the only son of a Father, full of grace and truth. (John testifies concerning him, and he has cried out saying, “This was the one of whom I said, ‘The one coming after me is ahead of me, because he existed before me.’”) Indeed, all of us have received from his fullness, grace upon grace. Because while the law was given through Moses, grace and truth have come about through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God the Only Son, who is at the side of the Father, has made him known.

[A note in explanation of my translation “the Word was god” (with a little “g”) in light of Greek grammar: I know most translations read, “the Word was God” (with a capital “G”), but that’s a little misleading with respect to the syntax of the Greek sentence. The placement of the word “god” does not reflect the proper name “God,” but rather what is usually called a “qualitative” sense of the word. It’s like saying, “Abraham was father to a great multitude;” calling him “a father” or “the father” wouldn’t mean quite the same thing. Some have suggested translating the phrase in John 1 as, “the Word was divine;” that would be accurate but would miss out on the repetition of the word “god,” which I think is important for the rhythm of the sentence. This grammatical subtlety of the passage is actually an excellent parallel to the subtlety of Christian reflection on what it means for Jesus to be divine.]

John turns the prologue to his story of Jesus into a retelling of the creation of the world by playing off the ambiguity of the Greek word logos. Among its many meanings, logos can mean both “word” and “reason” (i.e., logic); Greek philosophers often used it with the latter meaning. Philo of Alexandria (20 B.C. – A.D. 40), a Jew who was heavily influenced by Greek thought, portrayed the logos in personified form as an angel of wisdom who was responsible for directing humanity toward paths of righteous reason, lest they incur the wrath of God through their unreasoned wickedness. The OT book of Proverbs personifies “Wisdom” (closely related to the logos in Philo’s hellenistic Jewish thought world) as a (female) figure who participated in creation (Prov 8:27f).

It wouldn’t have been much of a stretch for early Christians to identify this apparently divine figure with Christ, and John 1 is a great example of just such an identification.

The beauty of the word “Word” as employed in John’s retelling of creation is that a spoken word, “Let there be light” (actually two words in both Hebrew and Greek), was the very means by which God created the world. God did not need to use a tool or an assistant or even his hand to bring light to the darkness, but only a word. For John, that word was the Word, Christ.

As beautiful as that reference is on its own, John weaves it into a far more complex picture by playing on the dual meaning of logos as both “word” and “reason.” While it is obvious that darkness and light in John 1:5 function figuratively (referring to the proclamation of righteous knowledge in a world of wicked ignorance), the passage is far richer when we bear in mind that the creation imagery is still in view. In the incarnation, God has repeated his first act of creation, brining light into darkness once again through his Word.

This is not just incidental or sentimental for John. Rather, his entire portrait of Christ is based on the notion that Jesus is the revelation of God. All of his words and all of his deeds reveal God to the world (thus John 1:18, he “has made him known”). What better way for humanity to learn true reason than for Reason (= Light = Truth = Only Son) himself to become a human and meet them in person? To find out what is true about the father, one must watch and listen for what the Son (who is at the Side of the Father) reveals.

We can probably take this one step further, if we push a bit. Gnostics (whose ideology many argue grew up alongside Christianity) tended to separate knowledge from the created world, arguing that the former was good and the latter bad. As a result, they tended to play off the God of Jesus Christ (who revealed knowledge) against the God of Israel (who created the world), thus turning the Creator into a wicked sub-deity who defied what Wisdom, the supreme deity, wanted.

The way John describes Christ in chapter 1, however, undermines what the Gnostics claimed by refusing to see two forces at work. John will not allow his reader to assume that the “Truth” which Jesus reveals is something one must break free from the created world to see. Instead, the logos is the very word God used to create the world––which means the world has to be a good thing. You can’t set up reason in opposition to the created world if the world was created through reason.

So, to put it in modern theological terms, in case anyone wanted to misinterpret Jesus as belonging to another world and somehow condemning created matter, John insists that both “special revelation” (what God tells us in words) and “natural revelation” (what we can learn by looking at creation) come from the same source: the logos who brought light into darkness both in the creation of Genesis 1 and in the incarnation described by John.