Committed Critic

The Old Testament has many references to gods other than Yahweh, and scholars have spent more than a century trying to sort them all out. Baal is one of the Canaanite gods, mentioned often in the OT without much explanation; the Bible usually only cares that he was an idol that many Israelites worshiped.

Though the OT doesn’t tell us much about the Canaanite’s religion, the people originally writing and reading the OT did know more, and so it can help us understand what’s going on if we’re familiar with the stories the Canaanites told about Baal. Here is a synopsis of perhaps the most popular account. I leave out several characters, but I try to capture the heart of the story:

The story begins with El, the head of the pantheon, pictured as an old many with a grey beard sitting upon a throne as judge of the gods. While the gods pay El respect as a figurehead, his son Baal is the mighty warrior, the storm god and “Rider of the Clouds,” the giver of rain to the earth, and the one whom the gods actually obey.

But El also has another son named Sea, who is alienated from the royal family. At one of the royal feasts, while the gods eat and drink, Sea sends messengers to seize Baal so he can usurp his throne. Most of the gods are terrified, and El quickly acquiesces, ready to hand over his son.

But Baal refuses with an impassioned speech: “Lift up your heads, O gods! –– off your knees, off your princely thrones –– And let me answer Sea’s messengers!” Baal strikes the messengers, then enlists the help of a craftsman named Kotaru to carve two maces for the fight against his brother. Baal finds Sea, strikes him dead, and maintains his princely throne.

In celebration, Baal throws a great feast, after which he demands that a temple be built for him on Mount Zaphon, the great mountain to the north of Canaan. After clearing the idea with El and the chief goddess, the craftsman Kotaru is summoned again, and Baal gets his temple. In celebration, he hosts yet another feast, and the gods eat and drink yet again.

However, feeling proud of his new temple, Baal sends a boastful message to Death, who is king of the underworld and another rival to Baal’s power. Death replies with a threat: “Invite me, Baal…and eat bread with my brothers, drink wine with my kin! Have you forgotten, Baal, that I can pierce you through?” Baal is frightened and backs off his boast, but Death soon finds him and kills him anyway.

Baal’s sister Anatu, distraught at his death, wonders how the world will survive with the rain-god dead. While the other gods try in vain to find an apt replacement to fill Baal’s throne, Anatu goes instead to Death for vengeance. She cuts, burns, and grinds Death to pieces, setting Baal free to return to life.

Though Death somehow survives the drubbing, Baal reemerges as ruler of the gods, taking revenge on the rest of his foes and thwarting Death’s plots against him. The story ends with Baal on his rightful throne as ruler of the gods.

This story raises some helpful points for understanding what mythology is:

• The names of the gods are often symbolic: Sea and Death make obvious appearances in the translation I’ve used here; also, El means God and Baal means Lord.
• Symbolism is key for the story. Baal is the storm-god who brings rain to the land of Canaan, which allows the crops to grow so people can feed their children. Sea is a sort of chaos-monster; the ocean has sea-monsters like Leviathan and waves that sink ships. For Baal to conquer Sea means for the powers of order (e.g., predictable crop cycles) to conquer the powers of chaos, so that people can live safe lives.
• The other key point of symbolism is that Baal is killed by Death, but he only stays dead for a time. In an ancient agricultural society, people had to reckon with life and death every year, and the reality of winters––when crops didn’t grow and the land seemed to die––brought fear and uncertainty. The Baal myth reminds the people that even though a time of death (winter) comes each year, the rain-god only stays dead for a time, after which he comes to life again in spring.
• I don’t know how seriously people took this as a literal story, but its purpose was religious, not historical. It helped the Canaanites understand the god they worshipped, not specific historical events.
• Certainly Baal doesn’t live up to the ideas of God in Jewish and Christian scriptures –– for example, that he is just, unchanging, and intimately concerned with people. The portrait of Baal corresponds instead to something the Canaanites perceived: that whoever provided rain was fickle and inconsistent.

The Hebrew scriptures are generally more interested in what God does in history than in myth, which is why the exodus from Egypt receives so much attention. However, the OT also uses mythical images borrowed from Israel’s Canaanite neighbors.

In some passages, the OT texts seem to “demythologize” these myths, at least in part, so that Yahweh isn’t actually fighting a war against other gods. An example of this is Genesis 1: Yahweh brings order (land) out of the watery chaos, but he doesn’t have to fight any Sea-God in order to do it. And rather than describing Yahweh warring against astral deities, Genesis 1 describes how Yahweh created the sun, moon, and stars as objects, such that they’re aren’t gods at all, as other peoples thought them to be.

In other passages, however, OT scriptures use the myths themselves as apparent descriptions of what Yahweh actually did. An example is Psalm 74:12-14: “Yet God my King is from old, working salvation in the earth. You divided Sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan.” Here God basically takes on the role of Baal from the epic above: reigning as king, fighting Sea and the dragons within him. The psalmist also applies this myth to the historical situation (he’s asking why God has allowed Jerusalem to be conquered), but he seems to have no problem with describing Yahweh using myth.

The point here isn’t that the OT is a collection of “myths,” which most people would assume to simply mean stories that aren’t true. Rather, myth is a literary genre used to argue something theological, not to recount something historical. We should consider that some authors can use myths that aren’t meant to be taken literally in order to paint images of their gods, and that in fact our Bible uses some of those images to describe our God, Yahweh.

See also my earlier post on the names of Baal and Yahweh.

Bible scholars have recently challenged the “supercessionist” idea that Jesus intended to replace Judaism with Christianity, or that the New Testament replaces Jews with (Christian) Gentiles as the people of God. A key battleground text for this question is the Gospel of Matthew, and a key assumption in the way I will interpret it is that different parts of the Bible don’t always agree with one another.

I’ll pursue the idea that Matthew’s church believed that the Jews were still the people of God, and that Gentiles, though welcome to join in following Christ, had in no sense inherited the faith from the Jews as a whole.

Here are four key texts for the issue. The first is from the Sermon on the Mount, where this particular passage represents Jesus’ fundamental teaching about the law (Matt 5:17-19):

Don’t suppose that I came to overthrow the law or the prophets; I didn’t come to overthrow but to fulfill. Truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one iota or one stroke of a letter will pass away from the law until all things have happened. Therefore, whoever rejects one of the least of these commandments, and teaches the same to other people, will be called least in the heavens’ kingdom. But whoever does and teaches them will be called great in the heavens’ kingdom.

In a second text, Jesus remarks on the faith of a Roman Centurion (Matt 8:10-12):

Truly I say to you, I haven’t found such faith from anyone in Israel. I tell you, many from the east and west will come and recline at table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the heavens’ kingdom, but the sons of the kingdom will be cast into the darkness outside, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

In a third passage Jesus responds to Pharisees and scribes who ask why his disciples don’t follow the tradition of ritually washing their hands before eating. A key point of his response is Matt 15:11, 17-20:

What enters the mouth does not make a person unclean; but what comes out of the mouth, that is what makes a person unclean…Don’t you know that everything that enters the mouth moves to the stomach and then is expelled into the toilet? But the things that come out of the mouth come out of the heart, and these make someone unclean; for out of the heart come disagreements, wicked deeds, murders, adulteries, thefts, false testimonies, and blasphemy. These are the things that make a person unclean, but eating with unwashed hands doesn’t make a person unclean.

Finally, at the crucifixion of Jesus, there is an important exchange between Pilate and the people of Jerusalem (Matt 27:24-25):

Now when Pilate saw that he was accomplishing nothing, but that it was becoming a riot, he took water and washed off his hands in the presence of the crowd and said, “I am innocent of this man’s blood––see for yourself.”

And the whole people answered, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children.”

TWO INTERPRETATIONS:

One traditional Christian understanding of Matthew runs something like this:

• Jesus “fulfills” the law by spiritualizing it, so that Christians simply love God and one another in place of the Jewish law. Jesus’ encounter with the Roman centurion provides the occasion for him to prophecy that the Jews, who lacked faith in Jesus, would be replaced by Gentile Christians as the people of God. Jesus’ teaching about what enters and exits the mouth is his proclamation that Jewish purity laws no longer pertain to Christians. And the crowd’s statement, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children,” represents the Jews (as a whole) rejecting Jesus and accepting guilt for his death.

In contrast to this is an alternate reading, proposed in recent years by scholars who feel that Matthew’s gospel is too Jewish to intend such an anti-Jewish message. This interpretation runs as follows:

• Jesus “fulfills” the law by showing Jewish Christians how to observe Torah by intensifying it in a particular heart-felt way rather than with the (also heart-felt) Pharisaic practice using strict oral traditions to be sure of observing Torah. Jesus’ encounter with the Roman centurion leads him to issue a standard prophetic warning, much like those in the OT prophets, that God would punish Israel if they did not repent of their sins. Jesus’ teaching about what enters and exits the mouth only rejects the Pharisaic practice of hand-washing, not the entire system of Jewish purity laws. And the crowd at the crucifixion represents not the Jews as a race or religion, but the people of Jerusalem as a generation that rejected Jesus; Matthew sees the punishment for Jesus’ blood as coming back against the people of Jerusalem and their children (i.e., the next generation) when Jerusalem is destroyed by Rome 40 years later.

SOME OBSERVATIONS

I lean toward the latter reading. Here are a few points supporting it:

• In Matthew 5 Jesus never gets rid of any laws––whether for Jews or Gentiles––and indeed he explicitly criticizes those who would.
• Jesus never breaks the Jewish law in Matthew. When accused of breaking the Sabbath (Matt 12:2), he only claims that his work is a justified exception in the same way as an emergency rescue or priestly work in the Temple.
• In Mark’s story about hand-washing, Mark does claim that Jesus was declaring all food clean (Mk 7:19). However, Matthew eliminates that line from the story, and then he adds Jesus’ statement only against handwashing (a tradition of the Pharisees, not a biblical law). It seems here that Matthew disagrees with Mark about what Jesus means: he was only saying that handwashing was unnecessary for purity, not that all food were clean.
• The Hebrew prophets say many awful things about the Israelites/Jews, but the assumption is always that the Jews remain the people of God. To use Jesus’ harsh words against Jews as evidence that God was rejecting the Jews as God’s people is to misunderstand Jesus’ role as a prophet.

IMPLICATIONS

It is no surprise that Matthew is often read as supercessionistic by Christians: Matthew claimed that Jesus had the only true interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures, open also to Gentiles. As time passed, and more Gentiles than Jews became Christians, Matthew’s words seemed to have a different meaning. However, at the first, all of Jesus’ followers were Jews, and the earliest Palestinian churches were Jewish. If we hypothesize that Matthew wrote for one of these Jewish communities, the Gospel of Matthew would fit that context very well.

If there were NT Jewish Christians who could follow Jesus and still observe Torah, it should discourage us from too easily championing “Christian faith” against “Jewish legalism.” In Matthew’s opinion, Jesus did not reject Judaism, but rather called Jews (and ultimately Gentiles) to a particular form of Judaism.

Perhaps most important, the fault for Jesus’ crucifixion does not fall on “the Jews” in any broad sense. All of the heroes at the crucifixion were Jews, and the villains were a mixture of Jews and Gentiles. Matthew seems to think that one generation of Jerusalem residents, led by a wicked High Priest, rejected Jesus and were almost immediately punished for it. To suggest that blood remains on the heads of Jews today would not only be dangerous and possibly hateful, but it would miss the point made my Matthew.

My reading distinguishes between what we believe and the implications of what we believe. For Christians, it is still difficult to escape the conclusion (based on Matthew, at least) that non-Christian Jews are outside of the people of God. Though the idea is obviously offensive to Jews and many Christians as well, the Christian confession “Jesus is Lord” leaves little room for equivocation, at least on the question of where one’s loyalty must lie. But scholarly readings of Matthew that challenge us to shift our perspective can help us see that whatever our present faith, our Scriptures probably looked very different to those who wrote them.

Most of my ideas here are based on reading Matthew’s Christian-Jewish Community, by Anthony J. Saldarini. For a shorter and less technical study of Matthew that somewhat disagrees but deals with similar issues, see the The Theology of the Gospel of Matthew (from Cambridge University Press’s New Testament Theology series), by Ulrich Luz.

From time to time I like to write up explanations for biblical words that I think get used in incorrect (yet interesting) ways. My previous posts have dealt with the words Calvary and helpmeet.

Here I’d like to discuss two proper names for deities in the Old Testament, and why I think English translations may obscure rather than clarify their sense. The names are Yahweh and Baal. (Note I have a more recent post where I discuss the story of Baal that survives from ancient Canaan.)

First I need to explain the distinction between a few Hebrew words. Several of them may be familiar. Note also that several of the words can function either as a common noun or as the proper name of a deity.

SOME HEBREW NAMES FOR GOD(S) AND LORD(S)

El is the Hebrew word for “god,” a cognate of the Arabic name Allah, used by Muslims. El could be a simple noun (similar to the lower-case god in English), but it was also the proper name of a Canaanite deity (similar to our upper-case use of the word God as a name). Hebrew has no upper or lower case letters, so the distinction must be determined from usage and context.

Elohim is, grammatically, just the plural of El, but it was used as another name for God. In the OT, Elohim is typically translated simply as “God,” such as in Genesis 1:1.

Yahweh is the primary name of the God of Israel. Other names such as Shaddai were used as well, but Yahweh was the most distinctive. In most English translations, Yahweh is translated “LORD” (see below), either in all capital letters or with small caps.

Adon is the Hebrew noun meaning “lord” or “master;” in the vast majority of cases it is used with a first person possessive prefix, spelled adonai (”my lord”). Either form could be a polite or submissive way of addressing either a human superior, or God.

Jehoveh is not a real Hebrew word at all, but rather is a later Christian misunderstanding of the name Yahweh. The reasons are complicated (maybe I’ll explain them in a later post), but the important point is that certain Hebrew letters can be transliterated into English in different ways, so that the Hebrew letter yod (spelled “jot” in Matt 5:18 in the KJV) shows up in English as either Y or J, and the Hebrew letter waw can be translated as either W or V. So then, the vowels of Yahweh were misunderstood by (much) later English translators as Yehowah, which they wrote as Jehovah. It works fine as a traditional name, but it isn’t really Hebrew.

Baal is a Hebrew word meaning owner, husband, or lord. It could also function as a proper noun referring to a Canaanite storm and fertility god: Baal was venerated for causing thunder and lightning, and for giving the rain that fertilized crops.

YAHWEH AND BAAL

What is interesting to me here is that Yahweh is at its core a proper name, whereas Baal was originally just a common noun (”lord” or “owner”) that came to be used as a proper name later in antiquity. Yet modern translations represent the Hebrew Yahweh with English LORD — a word that is not explicitly a proper noun — while they transliterate the Hebrew Baal as a word in English that appears to be only a proper name.

The result is an ironic swapping of the representation of the two names: in the Hebrew Yahweh is a proper noun and Baal comes from a common noun, yet the English translations suggest just the opposite.

Bruce Metzger, editor of the NRSV, explains one rationale behind the translation of Yahweh, writing in the preface of the NRSV:

The use of any proper name for the one and only God, as though there were other gods from whom the true God had to be distinguished, began to be discontinued in Judaism before the Christian era and is inappropriate for the universal faith of the Christian Church.

Now, in most cases, the NRSV (correctly, in my opinion) avoids altering the wording of OT passages to make them fit Christian interpretations. A famous example of this is Isa 7:14, where the NRSV translates “young woman” instead of “virgin,” since the former is more a accurate rendering of the Hebrew even though the latter is the meaning of the later Greek translations used especially by Christians.

It’s true that the early Christians used Greek translations of the OT that had the word “Lord” (Greek Kyrios) instead of the proper name “Yahweh,” yet modern translators should hardly feel bound to every convention that the ancients used — this is the whole point of going back to the original Hebrew, rather than just using the Greek Septuagint or the Latin Vulgate.

MAKING (NON)SENSE OF TEXTS

It seems to me that the position advocated by Metzger (who was actually somewhat of a conservative) leads readers to make assumptions that are basically what the ancient Israelites were opposing when they wrote the name Yahweh in their texts instead of just El or Adonai. This is not to idealize the Israelites, who committed plenty of idolatry. Yet Yahweh wasn’t used by other peoples, and the very use of the name served as a claim that the gods worshipped by surrounding nations weren’t the same.

Christians may prefer to worship God under the name “God,” a name that can be used by English-speaking adherents to any religion. Yet it is worth remembering that our Old Testament also uses a special name for God that cannot be universalized so readily.

In many places the OT text goes out of its way to emphasize God’s particular name. A good example is Psalm 18:31, which the NRSV translates, “For who is God except the LORD?” With this translation, the verse can come across as redundant or even virtually meaningless, especially when read out loud. One can still make sense of it, but it lacks the force that it has when translated more literally: “For who is God besides Yahweh?”

Metzger may be right that Christians should not imply that other gods are real, yet the rhetoric of Psalm 18:31 depends on the assumption that people who were around at that time generally assumed there were other gods. You have to be able to talk about other gods in order to insist that they aren’t real; if we obscure the language that allows for talk of other gods, then we present a text to English readers that obscures the argument the author was making.

Exodus 3:13-15 is practically ruined by the obscuring of the name Yahweh. When God (in the burning bush) sends Moses to Egypt, Moses worries that the elders of Israel may ask the name of the God who is sending him. God’s response, as the NRSV translates it, is:

Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you”: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.

Here the translation “the LORD” makes the text almost unintelligible for those who aren’t paying close attention. Instead of the proper name Yahweh, we get the generic “The LORD,” even though the whole point is that Yahweh is a proper name. It would make far more sense in texts such as these to simply transliterate the name Yahweh.

THE PAYOFF

This may seem a small point, and I will admit that the stakes are relatively low. Yet my conviction is that we should let different biblical texts make their different points, rather than smoothing them over based on our theology. We may decide, especially from the New Testament, that we should use the generic names “God” or “the Lord” in our own prayers or sermons. But we have an enormous collection of texts in the Old Testament that use the proper name Yahweh, and I’m an advocate for translating texts so that their original sense is clear.

Granted, there are settings where Christians might avoid saying the divine name out loud in respect for Jews who are present. Yet the Jewish avoidance of speaking the name of Yahweh is not commanded in Scripture, and so I see no reason for Christians not to use the name Yahweh, just as we readily say the name Jesus — as long as we use both names with reverence.

Most English translations still use small caps to identify the divine name in the text, so it is not difficult to substitute the name Yahweh while reading OT texts aloud, for example in church.

And there is a theological payoff. The pluralistic leanings of Western society can lead us to assume that all peoples essentially worship the same God. No doubt this is at least partially true, yet the use of the name Yahweh reminds us that much of Scripture is not content with using a generic name for God — which is what Baal would have sounded like to ancients. Instead, Jews and Christians worship a particular god, who chose a particular people, and told them to call him by a particular name.

We may have reasons for disagreeing with the language used by the Scriptures, but if we are going to continue reading them, we should translate them in the sense their authors intended.

For more information on the names Yahweh and Baal, see their entries in the Anchor Bible Dictionary (now published as the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary), edited by David Noel Freedman.

A few weeks back I wrote about why the word “Calvary” isn’t actually in the Bible, except for the King James Version.

Here I want to look at another example of a nonsense word that gets used pretty frequently, again because of a misreading of the KJV’s archaic/awkward English. People, especially from conservative Protestant traditions, sometimes refer to a man’s helpmeet, with reference to the wife (Eve) that God created for Adam. The problem is that the word doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Genesis 2:18 explains why God decides to create Woman. It says something like,

Then Yahweh God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make for him a helper that is suitable for him.”

This last phrase, “a helper that is suitable for him,” consists of two Hebrew words: ‘êzer ke-negdô. The first word means simply help or helper. The second word is actually a prepositional phrase, which would literally mean something like, “like that which corresponds to him.”

It’s pretty obvious that the text is trying to say that the Woman corresponded to the Man, or that she was appropriate for him (see Gen 2:20, which uses the same phrase ‘êzer ke-negdô), whereas the animals (2:18) were not. In other words, Eve was another human.

This is where the English of the KJV gets confusing. The KJV translators never used the words suitable or fitting, but they occasionally used the word meet, which had a similar meaning (see, e.g., Ex 8:26; Deut 3:18; Jud 5:30). As it turns out, the word is not particularly fitting or helpful for the modern reader, as Gen 2:18-20 demonstrates.

The KJV translates Gen 2:18,

And the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.”

A relative pronoun could have helped avoid misunderstanding (“I will make him a help that is meet for him”), but as the text stands it is easy to see why people have misread the phrase. The phrase “an help meet for him” doesn’t really make sense to modern readers, and so people have tended to combine help with meet to make a single term. Presumbably most people just assume that it’s an archaic word that people knew back when the KJV was translated, which of course is partly ironic because the original readers of the KJV (published in 1611) apparently would have understood it as two separate words.

Part of the blame for the misunderstanding goes back to the 17th century, where we have an author named John Dryden who used the two words as a hyphenated phrase (“help-meet”) to describe his wife in 1673. (These are the kinds of things you can find out in the Oxford English Dictionary.) Today, Webster’s simply lists it as a single word, helpmeet, which it notes is a combination of the noun and the adjective.

I probably shouldn’t talk about blame for the word, since in theory, any word is legitimate if it’s useful. If a man wants to refer to his wife using biblical language, helpmeet seems to get the job done.

But then, maybe it doesn’t work so well. My favorite part of all this is that the English language now also has the word helpmate. It’s possible that this word came about on its own, since its first known attestation (1715) refers to helpers in general rather that to a wife in particular. But in my copy of Webster’s, it’s listed simply as another way of writing helpmeet.

The convergence of these two words makes perfect sense considering that for the average person who hears the word helpmeet, the meaning of help is very clear, but the attached word meet doesn’t make any sense. So, people adjust the word (through an intuitive kind of folk etymology) to something that does make sense, and mate obviously fits when referring to one’s wife.

So, is it meet for us to judge a word like this? My tendency is to say yes: I think it should be phased out of use. Even though the word is useful for alluding quickly to Genesis, language should help us communicate clearly, and the alternative use of the word helpmate shows that for most people, this word is confusing. People who don’t know what meet originally meant in the KJV are likely to have a vague sense that it should be mate instead, and people who do know what it meant aren’t likely to use it at all.

With this post, I want to raise the question of whether those of us in the Church of Christ tradition should start reckoning the age of accountability for baptism as closer to 20 than to 13.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, some background will be necessary:

I come from a Christian tradition called the Church of Christ, whose most defining characteristic is its insistence on believers baptism: people are baptized (= immersed) only once they are old enough to choose. We may disagree on many things among our congregations, but I am confident that you could search the nation without finding a CofC that uses the Believer’s Prayer or infant sprinkling to initiate members.

Personally and theologically, I fully support this practice: it emphasizes Christianity as a voluntary response to God’s call, entailing commitment and obedience. The New Testament lacks the notion of a nominal Christian, and believers baptism proclaims that fact in a graphic way.

The practice also demonstrates the belief that conversion is rebirth into a new life, in which the believer lives in obedience to God, empowered by the Holy Spirit. It sees baptism as an antidote not merely for original sin as found in an infant, but for the gritty reality of an adult who knows exactly how he or she has betrayed God.

But who can be a “believer”?

Although Martin Luther argued that God can give the gift of faith to an infant as easily as to an adult, most people would admit that the kind of faith typically portrayed in the New Testament requires a person to be a bit older. As a result, those who practice infant baptism often focus on the parents’ faith as well as their role in raising the child with a faith they can grow into. This is a worthy goal, but I think baptism is intended to signify an individual’s rebirth, not a family’s intentions.

Believers baptism is not without its problems either. For example, it raises the question whether young children are saved if they die before they are baptized.

Because certain scriptures describe young children who do not know the difference between right and wrong, some have argued that such children cannot actually sin. At some point, it is argued, they do come to know right from wrong, at which point they become accountable for their sin, and thus in need of salvation.

This age of accountability is kind of a nebulous boundary, and it guarantees that some children will die having reached this age of accountability but not having realized it. If we wanted to assure that no child died after reaching accountability but before baptism, we could push baptism to an earlier age, but that would require us to encourage baptism before the age of accountability, which would undermine the meaning of believers baptism in the first place. As a result, believers baptism requires an assumption that God will show mercy for borderline cases.

Some of this probably sounds silly to those not acquainted with the tradition, but these things matter to people, and they need to be reasoned out. Churches face the genuine pastoral concern of communicating to children (and their parents) that people need God’s forgiveness, but that children should not be bullied with the fear of hell.

There is an age, however, where the church needs to speak clearly about sin and the need for salvation, and the trick is determining what that age is. 4? 8? 13? 18?

Churches of Christ have tended to asssociate that age with the age of accountability, which more or less means the age of moral responsibility. Kids around age 13 start to develop ways of thinking very similar to adults, so it’s a natural time to view young people as making the leap from childhood to adulthood, and thus to accountability. In practice, this age varies from kid to kid and from family to family, but my sense is that the bell curve, if you took a survey, would peak at age 13.

However, it’s clear that kids have at least some notion of right and wrong by the time they start kindergarten. And what’s more, kids’ thinking at 13 is really only an approximation of adult thought. It seems to me, then, that we’re pretty much picking an age according to our best guess and assuming God will honor it since we don’t have anything more specific in Scripture to go on.

Personally, I’m not persuaded that 13 is a good age for young people to make a decision for Christ and be baptized. If we have to pick an age more or less arbitrarily anyway, let’s pick one that reflects the struggle young people go though when deciding whether to live a Christian life.

The Scriptural witness: Warriors in the desert

As for age of accountability in Scripture, there is nothing close to a clear guideline associated with baptism. However, the Old Testament has at least one important instance where age appears to be used as a criteria for accountability.

When Moses takes a census at two points in Numbers, he counts only men aged 20 and older (e.g., Num 1:3; 26:2). When the people of Israel refuse to take the promised land, God responds by holding these men responsible: all those who were counted in the census would die in the desert before the later generation entered the land. Only Joshua and Caleb, because they were ready to obey Yahweh, would be allowed to enter (Num 14:29-30; 32:11-12).

It seems most reasonable that this specific group was punished because they were qualified for battle, and thus could have stepped forward to fight in obedience to Yahweh; Deut 2:14 supports this explanation. However, another passage in Deuteronomy suggests a different explanation:

And as for your little ones, who you thought would become plunder, your children, who today do not yet know right from wrong, they shall enter [the land]; to them I will give it, and they shall take possession of it. (Deut 1:39)

It seems that the children under 20 weren’t held accountable for their parents’ mistake because they did not yet know right from wrong. This suggests 20 as the closest thing we have to a biblical “age of accountability.”

Guidelines for the church?

My point here is not to be a legalist in search of a proof text, but rather to wonder whether this seemingly arbitrary number from the OT is nearer to the reality of when the typical person indeed knows better.

In one sense, we never know better. At every stage of my life so far, I’ve been able to recognize how badly I misunderstood the world in the previous stage, and I suspect that will continue for a long time. I’ve been studying scripture, theology, and ministry for 10 academic years now, and what I have learned has challenged, at times harmed, and at times strengthened my faith in many way. However, the primary doubts I have––the ones that make me ask why I follow Jesus in the first place––are the ones that started when I was 17.

The fact is, at age 13, kids don’t understand what the primary questions concerning their faith are going to be. By 25, they usually have a good idea. I could name off a veritable parade of my peers who have seriously questioned their faith either in college or in early adulthood. Most of them were baptized in early adolescence, and most of them had no idea how much their perception would change between ages 18 and 24.

The goal is not complete understanding or complete certainty, because many/most faithful believers continue to have doubts throughout their lives. But when we encourage 13-year-olds to be baptized, we almost may as well use infant baptism instead. While kids that age clearly understand the content of their faith, the questions that so often arise in later adolescents suggest that 13-year-olds lack an adequate understanding of what faith really entails.

We don’t encourage young people to jump into marriage before they have a good idea of who their future spouse is and what some of the struggles of an adult relationship will be; I don’t think we should encourage kids to commit to Christ before they understand what adult faith entails.

In light of all this, it seems to me that advocates of believers baptism should shift our expectation of when a young person is truly “qualified” to commit to Christ for life. To me, the biblical age of 20 seems like a good target.

How it might work:

Here’s what I would envision: through high school, kids are encouraged to learn the Christian faith, but they are neither expected nor allowed to be baptized. Parents and churches teach Christian values just the same, and teens are still taught about the reality of sin. In fact, teens can even think of themselves more or less as Christians (just like young kids in the church do now), but everyone acknowledges that they’re basically just living out their parents’ faith (which, let’s face it, is the reality for most baptized teens now).

As kids approach age 20, the church clearly communicates to them that they are becoming adults, and that it is time to count the cost of following Christ.

For 20-year-olds who have not yet encountered the issues of adult faith, this is an opportunity for them to do so, knowing that they are old enough that no one can force them to be baptized. It’s an opportunity for a young person to ask adults in the church difficult questions about the faith, and maybe even do some reading. Then, if she makes an adult decision to follow Christ, she can be baptized.

Concerns

One risk that parents will point out is that some kids will act out during high school, planning on being forgiven later. St. Augustine famously held a similar attitude as an unbaptized adolescent in the 4th century, when he prayed, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

My sense, though, is that most teenagers are going to do what they want, baptized or not. Christianity may be a useful tool to prevent some teens from acting out, but on the whole I think it’s only marginally successful, plus I’m not sure God wants us to “use” it in that way in the first place.

The other risk is that some young people who would have been baptized at 13 will choose not to be baptized at 20. I agree that this would happen. But my question is: Isn’t the whole point of believers baptism that people cannot be Christians by default? If a person is going to be a true adult disciple, won’t she choose baptism at 20 just as sure as she would have at 13? Shouldn’t we recognize that the person who has lost their faith by 20 was really just making an immature (though sincere) decision at 13?

In the end, I think this concern reflects the same kind of desire that leads most Christians to practice infant baptism. We might claim that our concern is for the children, but I think the real concern is for the adults in the church, who want reassurance that their children are saved. To put it bluntly: if we baptize our kids before they know better, then we can think of them as Christians even if they end up losing interest in the faith as adults.

Delaying baptism until age 20 would help us all see things for what they are. For those who profess to follow a Lord who despised hypocrisy and heartless religion, I think this is a better path.

There can be a big difference between the Bible stories you learned in Sunday school (or in the movies) and the details of the stories when you actually read them as an adult. Most of the time, the adult version is a lot cooler.

So for example, we all know that Charlton Heston’s Moses demanded of Pharaoh: “Let my people go!”

What’s interesting is that, in the Bible story, even though Moses does say those exact words, they are only the start of a sentence. And what he goes on to say makes a huge difference in the meaning of the story:

Let my people go, so that they may celebrate a festival to me in the wilderness. (Ex 5:1)

The catch is, the festival God instructs Moses to request is supposed to be for just a few days (see Ex 5:3), after which the Israelites will come back to Egypt and resume their slavery. But that clearly isn’t what God actually has in mind.

As readers, most of us assume that Moses’ request is for a permanent exodus of the people; and this is natural enough, since God has already told Moses that they’re leaving for good (Ex 3:8); we assume God wouldn’t tell Moses to lie.

But as the story goes on, it becomes clear that what Moses is asking for is quite different from what God has planned.

None of this is particularly hidden in the story. Pharaoh clearly starts to catch on to what Moses is doing (e.g., Ex 10:10), and he tries to put restrictions on Israel’s departure. Moses, in response, manufactures excuses to cover up his true intentions. When Pharaoh tells them to sacrifice within the land, Moses claims that the Israelites’ sacrifices are too offensive to the Egyptians (8:26). When Pharaoh says they have to leave their children in Egypt—obviously an attempt to make sure the Israelites will have motivation to return—Moses insists that all the people must be present for Yahweh’s festival (10:9). And when Pharaoh says Israel must leave some of its cattle behind (10:24), Moses insists that they will only know which cattle to sacrifice once they arrive at their place of worship (10:26).

We could try to construe each of these excuses as legitimate, but it looks far more like a shrewd game of cat and mouse between Moses and Pharaoh.

The Sting

This much, it seems to me, is fairly clear from a simple reading of the story, and even many casual readers have no doubt noticed it before. However, there’s another angle to the deception that most translations obscure. Exodus 12:35-36 describes how the Israelites leave Egypt:

The Israelites had done as Moses told them; they had asked the Egyptians for jewelry of silver and god, and for clothing, and the LORD had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And so they plundered the Egyptians.

I don’t know about everyone else, but this always seemed strange to me. Clearly God could manipulate the Egyptians into doing whatever God wanted, but still it seems as if it should make more sense.

There’s a simple solution that I think makes far more sense of the story than the traditional interpretation. The words translated “asked” and “let them have” in the NRSV above take their meaning from context; in this context they can be better translated “asked to borrow” and “lent.” In other words, the Israelites were told to “borrow” their neighbors’ valuables when they knew––but the Egyptians didn’t know––that they would be leaving almost immediately. After the plague of the first-born, Israel would depart the country before the Egyptians had a chance to ask for everything back. That’s why it was called plundering

Ancient and modern interpreters have often glossed over the passage to make Israel appear more honest, but that’s hardly necessary. The deception, as it turns out, is exactly parallel to the one God and Moses were attempting against Pharaoh: asking for something on loan, but planning all along to keep it permanently.

Who is this God?

The only real problem with this story is that it challenges some of our ideals about God. If God were going to bring Israel out by force, why use deception? And isn’t God supposed to be completely honest, by God’s very nature? God can’t lie, right? Isn’t that what Hebrews 6:18 says?

For what it’s worth, there’s probably a better interpretation of that Hebrews passage, relating it to a particular oath God took toward Abraham rather than to divine honesty in general. However, that may be beside the point. Passages like the Exodus story challenge us to consider parts of God’s work that don’t fit with pious sensibilities. God isn’t, after all, Christian, and there is such a thing as a command for humans that God doesn’t have to obey.

In this case, I think the point is that God’s triumph over Pharaoh and over Egypt is total. God is not content merely to free Israel from slavery, but rather God intensifies the situation to bring judgment and devastation upon Pharaoh and his people.

And even then, God could have gone ahead with the plagues even if Pharaoh had let the Israelites go immediately. It seems, then, that God’s purpose was not to force Pharaoh’s hand but to humiliate him. God wanted Pharaoh to bring destruction upon himself, and if he wasn’t going to fall for God’s ruse, he was going to be brought down by his own stubbornness. The plundering of the Egyptian people just added insult to injury.

That’s not the God we want to model our behavior (or our national policy!) after, but it appears that it is Yahweh, the God of the Bible.

See James L. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, 553–557.

For all the negative points I made about the Epistle of Barnabas, it does offer a beautiful portrait of redemption as the reenacting of God’s creation of humanity. Paul had written, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Look! The old has passed away, the new has come.” Barnabas simply restated that using the language of Genesis, and if his wording was a bit convoluted, nevertheless the image was powerful.

The image is also timeless, as evidenced by a pair of songs Gary Miller wrote for Acappella in the late 1990’s.

For those who don’t know me, the Chrisitan music group Acappella is the reason I know next to nothing about popular music from the eighties and nineties. In high school I had no fewer than 35 albums from their organization’s various groups (including Acappella, AVB, the Vocal Union, Keith Lancaster, Sweet Deliverance, His Image, and New Life Quartet), and it is no exaggeration to say that back then I could sing 300 of their songs from start to finish––and for many of them, I could sing most of the harmony parts. I’ve been to at least 10 of their concerts in 5 different states, and I’ve performed songs of theirs at church and school events with four different groups of friends spanning high school and college.

(I have a feeling that Matt, Cody, and Micah all have an idea of what I’m talking about.)

These two songs have their campy moments (the first one, no kidding, includes the lines “Let freedom ring!” and “Let children sing!”), but in both of them Miller does a beautiful job of using the creation story from Genesis, as Barnabas used it, to describe the work of Christ.

The first song speaks broadly, describing the fall of humanity and the change of the world order brought about by Christ:

from Let There Be Love
by Gary Miller (1999)

Once there was love, long ago
Sweet innocence, long ago
Please tell me where did it go?
Our of our hearts, out of our world

Then someone came in the night
Came to lead man to the light
Turn us around, make us right
Bring love to our hearts, love to our world

Let there be peace around the world
Let there by joy around the world
Let there be hope around the world
Let there be love around the world

The second song is more personal, beginning with God’s promise to Abraham and going on to proclaim God’s will as the starting point for believers’ lives and decisions, by virtue of the new beginning which God creates within people:

from Begins
by Gary Miller (1996)

To an aged man God spoke
Words that sounded like a joke
Soon his wife would bear a child
A saying hard to reconcile

So he asked, Can this thing be?
Can a nation spring from me?
With a body grown so old?
In a word this man was told:

Your life begins with God
Your love begins with God
Your hopes and you dreams
And your plans begin with God
Begin with God

I was standing on the edge of the road
Hopelessly alone in the dark
In the beginning I was empty and void
In my mind, my soul, my heart of hearts

The creator came and moved in my life
He spoke and turned my darkness to light
Day by day he’s rearranging my ways
He’s my Lord, my God, my King

The first song, of course, transforms the line “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3) into “Let there be love.” The second song is more subtle (though just barely), using the reference to the dark as well as the words empty and void, to point to the unformed earth of Gen 1:2 as a metaphor for a person’s life before they are recreated by God.

I don’t have a lot of reflections to add, except to say that I find these lyrics both beautiful and powerful. They’re another example (as I noted before of contemporary song lyrics) of how intertextuality can help theology become art.

I’m also kind of interested in the thoughts of any other Acappella junkies. Anyone want to compete for bragging rights about Acappella album collections, concert attendance, or whatever? If you were a fan when you were young, are there any albums of theirs you still listen to?

Returning to my series on theological texts that interpret the creation story using intertextuality (read the start of this post for a definition), I want to look at how an early Christian letter called the Epistle of Barnabas interpreted the creation of Adam as pointing to salvation in Christ.

The author of Barnabas most likely wrote between about A.D. 70 and 135. He’s almost certainly not the biblical Barnabas, but we’ll call him that for convenience.

Old Testament Background

Barnabas specializes in allegorical interpretation, meaning that he interprets a given Old Testament text by explaining that certain words in the passage really refer to something different than a casual reading might suggest. This is a method that was popular among Greeks and some Jews (like Philo), although Barnabas turns the method against the Jews. To figure out what he’s doing, first we have to review the OT passages he’s using. Barnabas focuses on three scriptural texts in particular:

Genesis 1:26-28: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’”Genesis 2:7: “Then Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”

Exodus 33:1-3: “Yahweh said to Moses, ‘Go, leave this place, you and the people whom you have brought up out of the land of Egypt, and go to the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, “To your descendants I will give it.” I will send an angel before you, and I will drive out the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jubusites. Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey…’”

The key to fitting these three passages together is recognizing a wordplay on the Greek word we transliterate as “geo”. The word can be translated into English as “earth”, “land” (as in “the land of Oz”), or “ground,” corresponding approximately to its three senses in our words geocentric, geopolitical, and geology. (Geopolitical is admittedly a stretch.) The word shows up in all three senses in the passage we’ll look at from Barnabas. Note that this wordplay does not work in Hebrew (the original language Genesis and Exodus were written in), but since Barnabas was apparently reading the text in Greek translation, it does work for him.

The ambiguity of this word affects the interpretation of any number of Bible passages. So for example, “The meek shall inherit the earth” (Matt 5:5) could refer to the whole planet, but in Psalm 37:11 the same line seems to refer to the land of Israel. Or for another example, the fifth commandment promises long life in the (promised) land in exchange for obedience to parents, but Ephesians 6:2, written for Gentiles, seems to interpret this as long life on this earth.

So as it turns out, in the Greek version of the Old Testament, the word for “ground” in Gen 2:7 –– the stuff man was made of –– is the same word as the promised “land” in Ex 33:1. In fact, all the words in bold in the three passage quoted above are the exact same word in Greek. This opens up room for Barnabas to make some interesting connections.

Particularly notice how the word “form” (both noun and verb) shows up repeatedly. I’m quoting (with adjustments) from Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers:

(8) What does the other prophet, Moses, say to [Israel]? “Behold, thus says the Lord God: ‘Enter into the good land, which the Lord promised by oath to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and take possession of it as an inheritance, a land flowing with milk and honey.” (9) But now learn what knowledge has to say: set your hope upon Jesus, who is about to be revealed to you in the flesh. For man is suffering earth [ = land], for Adam was formed out of the face of the earth.

(10) What, therefore, does “into the good land, a land flowing with milk and honey” mean? … (11) Inasmuch as he renewed us, then, by the forgiveness of sins, he made us into another type of person, so that we should have the soul of children, as if he were forming us all over again. (12) For the Scripture speaks about us when he says to the Son: “Let us make man according to our image and likeness, and let them rule over the beasts of the earth and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea.”

And when he saw that we were formed well, the Lord said: “Increase and multiply and fill the earth.” These things he said to the Son. (Barn. 6.8–12)

The Theological Claim

A big part of Barnabas’s argument in the 21-chapter letter is that Israel failed to understand what God was saying to them through Moses and the scriptures. He (incorrectly) reads passages such as Isaiah 1:11, “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says Yahweh,” as indicating that God was trying to do away with animal sacrifices, but Israel just wasn’t listening (Barn. 2.5). This is ironic, of course, because in reality it’s Barnabas that doesn’t understand what Isaiah was getting at. But the important thing to recognize is that Barnabas wants to appropriate the Hebrew Scriptures as always talking about Jesus, almost always at the Jews’ expense.

In this case, Israel misunderstood the promise that the prophet Moses had delivered to them in Exodus. They thought he was concerned with a real land, but “knowledge” (i.e., correct allegorical interpretation; 6.9) has something different to say: Jesus, not the land of Israel, is the real purpose behind all these promises.

To make the jump from Moses to Christ, Barnabas uses the idea of the land: humans are nothing but “suffering earth” (2.9), because they were formed out of earth, and Christ shared in this earth/land/ground when he took on flesh. Now, just as God formed the first man from the dust of the earth, so also a new creation/formation takes place in Christ (6.11).

So when Moses spoke of a “land” that Israel was going to, he actually was saying that God would reenact creation, the moment God formed the first man from the dust of the earth. Under Christ, the forgiveness of sins is an act of re-creation or re-formation, by which God takes hold of the dirt from which we are made and forms a new person, with the soul of a child (6.11). In Barnabas’s opinion it is this that Moses meant when he spoke of a land to which God would lead Israel (6.8); only their hard hearts prevented them from realizing it.

After establishing the connection between creation and salvation, Barnabas teases out the implications by bringing in another passage on creation from Genesis 1: “And when he saw that we were formed well, the Lord said: ‘Increase and multiply and fill the earth.’ These things he said to the Son” (6.12).

Just as God told the first humans he formed to fill the earth, so also when God recreates humanity through the suffering of Christ, he gives the same command to the Son. A creation so good is not intended to keep to itself; taken from the dust of the ground, it should become a gift for every land across the earth. And so Christ sends us into the world.

Implications for the Church

The New Testament does cite innumerable OT passages that it claims are fulfilled in Christ. Paul even claims, broadly, that “in [Christ] every one of God’s promises is a ‘yes’.” But the Epistle of Barnabas takes that approach to Scripture a step further. The claim here is not simply that the promised land in Exodus prefigured the coming of Christ (as in Hebrews 4), but rather that the people of Israel were foolish and blind for thinking that God was concerned with giving them an actual land in the first place. True, God did give them a real land, but that wasn’t what God cared about.

Barnabas makes the same kind of argument concerning scripture after scripture from the OT, a good example being the Isaiah passage mentioned above. As the letter drags on, the practice becomes tiresome, and it becomes increasingly clear that Barnabas lacks not only an understanding of the various OT passages in context but also an appropriate respect for the people of Israel. Barnabas cites some scriptures that don’t exist, interprets other scriptures arbitrarily so that they always favor Christians, dabbles in numerology, and relentlessly attacks not only the choices and beliefs but also the sincerity and integrity of the Jewish people.

It would be easy to dismiss the Epistle of Barnabas on these grounds, but in reality the line is not all that sharp between it and some of the New Testament texts. It was probably written later than everything in the NT, but not by much. What’s more, hints of Barnabas’s tendencies were already present in texts that were received into the canon, and at least one early church father (Clement of Alexandria) cited Barnabas almost as if it were scripture. Ultimately, most of us would argue that wisdom and the Holy Spirit prevailed in the selection of the scriptures that were deemed suitable for public reading in the church (i.e., the canon). I can only hope that it was Barnabas’s contempt for the Jews, and not just its late date, that kept it from being included.

In a sense, though, Barnabas simply takes certain arguments from the New Testament scriptures to their logical conclusion, and it is here that I think it can serve as a warning for churches now.

The understanding of the truth of Scripture among fundamentalists and evangelicals in the United States can be troubling sometimes. We have a tendency –– and for good reasons –– to approach Scripture as absolute truth. But the problem with making truth absolute is that then you have to carry it to its logical conclusions.

But Scripture, when you really get down to it, often reflects more of a discussion among competing voices than it does absolute truth. Certainly, there are parts of Scripture I would claim to reflect absolute truth, but they are surrounded by any number of passages that need to be interpreted with nuance and open-mindedness.

Some of these questions are fairly trivial. If we’re studying who wrote the Torah (Genesis through Deuteronomy), our conclusions should not hinge solely on whether Jesus said the five books came from Moses. When Jude quotes 1 Enoch, a patently fictional apocalyptic writing that was popular in the first century, we must not insist that Adam’s great great great great grandson Enoch actually spoke those words. These kinds of claims, in my opinion, take Scripture to be something that it is not.

But in other places, the logical conclusions that certain readings of Scripture might lead us to have more serious consequences, and Barnabas is a good example. When Luke tells us that Jesus “opened [the apostles’] minds to understand the scriptures” (24:45), it’s no great leap for us to fall into the attitude of Barnabas and wonder at the Jews’ stupidity for failing to see what was written in front of them all along. Or when Revelation describes a violent overthrow of all non-Christians at the end of time, it is not hard to see why so many Christians over the centuries have tolerated violence because it seemed to support Christian causes.

Barnabas’s sin, ultimately, is the spiritualization of OT scriptures to the almost complete exclusion of their original meaning, and it is a sin often mimicked by Christians today. It’s ok to suggest that God ultimately is most concerned with us being poor in spirit, but if that leads us to neglect teachings concerning those who are actually poor, we are taking certain scriptures too far. It’s ok (and in my opinion, correct) to hold that Scripture contains truth that God wishes to communicate to the church and the world, but if we use it to shut down communication with secular voices or to ridicule those who disagree, I believe we are missing our calling.

I like to think that these misuses (in my opinion) of Scripture simply come from not reading it carefully enough, but the attitudes and positions I see on the American political/religious landscape –– among people who apparently read the Bible quite carefully –– suggest otherwise.

Hopefully, my treatment of the topic here –– in contrast to the approach Barnabas chose –– is respectful enough that it won’t shut out the people whose views I’m criticizing. Some of these questions are too important to polarize over.

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.

Before I go on to the other theological texts that use the Genesis 1 creation story, I want to tabernacle, so to speak, among the readers of John 1 for a time. In particular, I want to quote excerpts from a pair of songs by contemporary Christian musicians that take John 1 as their starting point. (I have to say at the outset that most CCM artists are awful, but these two have real substance, in my opinion.)

The first is a song by Michael Card, called “The Final Word” (Card, above left, also wrote “El Shaddai”):

You and me we use
so very many clumsy words.
The noise of what we often say
is not worth being heard.
When the Father’s Wisdom wanted
to communicate His love,
He spoke it in one final perfect Word.He spoke the Incarnation
and then so was born the Son.
His final word was Jesus,
He needed no other one.
Spoke flesh and blood so He could bleed
and make a way Divine.
And so was born the baby
who would die to make it mine.

And so the Father’s fondest thought
took on flesh and bone.
He spoke the living luminous Word,
at once His will was done.
And so the transformation
that in man had been unheard
Took place in God the Father
as He spoke that final Word.

The second song, by Rich Mullins, is called “It Don’t Do” (Mullins, above right, also wrote “Awesome God”):

It don’t do to preach the gospel
If you don’t live the Christian life
It don’t do to dream about heaven
If you never look up and see the skyIt don’t do to preach on Matthew
If you have not yet read Mark
It don’t do to scream about the judgment
If there is no love in your heart

It don’t do to preach on Moses
If you bow down to the golden calf
It don’t do to think about glory
If you never dare to laugh

Word became flesh and He dwelt among men
He let us see Him with our eyes
He let us hold Him in our hands
And before you say whatever you will
I think you better do the best that you can
Or it won’t do

Now, as far as these two artists go, I should note up front that Michael Card is probably the squarest musician I’ve ever heard, and (the late) Rich Mullins could push mushy sentimentality to its very limits. However, both know the Bible, both exhibit thoughtful theology in their lyrics, and both (as far as I can tell) lack the kind of pretension that makes Christian rock music look so silly sometimes. Card approaches John 1 as a theologian, Mullins as a preacher.

Card, though he perhaps conflates John with the other gospels, does a pretty straightforward interpretation of the text; his language is fresh enough to help us see the text as we may not have seen it, and yet the point his song makes is essentially the same as the point of John’s gospel.

Card often uses his music to teach, and in this case he presents a clear explanation of a theological truth in terms of the scriptural text it comes from. For my tastes, his language is too obvious to be good art, but then his audience is the generation before mine, and his prioritization of clarity above art seems intentional. In any event, I appreciate the clarity with which he communicates one of the messages of John 1 here.

Mullins does something more interesting in my opinion, first of all by bringing in 1 John 1, a passage closely related to John 1:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have handled, concerning the word of life –– indeed, life was revealed, and we have seen and we (now) testify and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and which was revealed to us. That which we have seen and heard, we (now) are proclaiming also to you, so that you, too, may have fellowship with us.

It isn’t entirely clear if 1 John intended for the “word” to refer to Jesus in the same way the Gospel of John did, but it is a reasonable interpretation, and so Mullins pulls them together to make his point.

The point, which Mullins of course makes more effectively with his lyrics than I can with my words here, is that God did not remain in heaven and speak words only at a distance. Rather, in Jesus Christ, God’s word became flesh (John 1) so that we could see it up close and handle it (1 John 1). So in a sense, God put his money where his mouth was, not asking anything of humanity that he would not do himself.

But Mullins does not stop with that theological claim; instead, he suggests that God’s action in the incarnation puts a claim on us as Christians. Because God’s word became flesh, our own words (of testimony, see 1 John 1) must become flesh too, in our actions.

Mullins plays (as John did) off the multiple meanings of “word,” linking it to our common experience of knowing (and being) Christians who speak far too many words with far too few actions. But instead of repeating, say, the cliché that we should practice what we preach, Mullins couches the plea in the terms of a pair of unexpected scriptural texts. This catches our attention with an unexpected challenge coming from a familiar text, and at the same time it enriches our reading of Scripture by suggesting connections we may not have seen before.

Scripture and Song as Theology

One reason I’m writing on these two songs is that good Christian music (whether CCM or church hymns) often does the same thing that Scripture does: it uses accepted traditions in creative ways to move us and motivate us, and in many cases it builds new theological truths that either were not present, or else were not apparent, in the originals.

To put it plainly, Michael Card and Rich Mullins are doing roughly the same thing John did. While Christians typically believe John’s text is inspired in a more profound sense than the works of modern musicians, nevertheless there should be a certain consistency in the way we listen to both kinds of “texts.” In both cases, we not only should learn from what we hear; we also should enjoy it. Scripture is not only revelation but also art.

It is my impression that God intends for us, at the same time that we believe in and obey Scripture, to appreciate it as something beautiful he has given us through the creativity of people created in his image.