The Question of Evil: Thoughts on Rabbi Gafni's Thesis
[Note to self: Write more often].
Been reading Walter Bruggemann, a leading Old Testament scholar (he is a Christian, so I guess its kosher to say OT, even though that is a somewhat religiously prejudiced term....I don't imagine if I were Jewish I would be pleased having my scriptures referred to as "Old").
He talks about two main themes, or rather a dominant and minority strain in the Old Testament narrative.
The dominant strain is what he calls contractual theology. Contractual theology is the typical story we are told as kiddies of a god-in-the-sky who looks down on us, sees everything. If we do good we get rewarded, if we do badly, we are punished--a celestial Santa Claus if you will.
This theme clearly runs through the Old Testament with God smiting sinners left and right--raining down fire and brimestone on Sodom&Gomorrah, flooding the earth. Or combining the two, at least according to conservative American Christians, in flooding New Orleans because it was the modern day equivalent of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Bruggemann also points out that this "contractual theology" was a Middle Eastern-wide phenomena in the ancient world. The Jews didn't make it up in other words. This form of contractual theology with an absentee judgmental God has been used to justify social oppression from day one.
The paragon of this order-contractual theology in Biblical langauge is the Pharaonic court of Egypt. Pharoah, in Egyptian thought, is the Son of Ra on earth. The heavenly realm is typified as a court--with the Kingly high god and his courtiers (lesser demigods, angelic-like beings). Pharoah was not ever to be criticized because he is god's representative on earth--criticize the king and you criticize the divine. Bad move.
Pharoah owns all the land and keeps everyone in a state of practial slavery--and if Jewish up-front slavery. The only group that gets a free pass, in terms of grain donations and fundings, are of course the religious scholars, who thereby legitimize the system.
Now there is a minority tradition as well within the Old Testament. Bruggemann says that this minority tradition comes from the embrace of pain. There are moments where God, as the Bible describes "him", is jealous, sorry, grieves, cries, and is hurt, like a forgotten lover. God as it were moves beyond his own contractual setup.
And what is more interesting is that God seems to "act" or "change" only after humans have raged against the contractual system, calling God to the carpet. Moses pleads with God not to destroy the Isrealites after they worship the Golden Calf. Abraham manages to sway God's anger away from the destruction of a sinful town because there exist at least ten righteous people. God grieves after the Flood, and has chosen Noah because Noah alone is the one who is still loving.
The emblematic story of the minority tradition is of course the Exodus itself. God hears the cries of the oppressed Hebrews and is spurred to action. In fact, according to Bruggemann, the tradition running from Exodus through Deuteuronomy, Prophets (especially Jeremiah and Amos), and the Psalms is the tradition of the minority voice.
Isrealite history then becomes the story of the outsiders chosen who end up re-inventing the wheel of oppression, by instituting their own monarchy--under David and especially Solomon--with a temple, a cosmic-order contractual theology legitimizing the king through patronage of the religious temple clerics, and thereby oppressing the masses.
The Kings of Israel are Pharoah reborn.
And God knows Pharoah is alive and well today.
Christianity, to the degree that it continues Hebraic themes, is faced with the same mainline and minority tradition. The mainline tradition that supports the status quo of oppression--a mainline theology that describes Christ's incarnation in purely external supernatualistic terms. The contractual theology is still well in place.
Christianity is a religion of grace, in ways that the ancient Hebraic tradition I think it can be strongly argued is not. Its a tricky issue, but to try and symplify I would say that Rabbinic Judaism (the Judaism from the Fall of the Temple in 67 CE until today) and Christianity are two offshoots of the earlier pre-Rabbinic Jewish traditions.
I think both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity stayed true to many of the themes of the Hebrew Scriptures, but developed them in their own ways. Now of course both Orthodox Jews and mythic-membership Christians will disagree with me. That's fine. They both take their story literally and are the only "true" inheritors of the Biblical tradition.
But if we take a post-metaphysical standpoint and simply watch how the traditions co-construct their own religions, we notice an interesting shift.
For example, Rabbinic Judaism never interpreted the story of Adam&Eve eating the Apple in the Garden as a Cosmic Fall/Original Sin. There is no tradition like that in Rabbinic Talmudic Judaism. So it can't be argued that the story of Adam&Eve necessarily means a Fall. That is to privilege the Christian reading.
So Christinaity as a religion of grace is intimately tied into the notion of Fall-Original Sin. This construct, which is Pauline Christianity is not the theme of Rabbinic Judaism. Western theology takes Augustine's reading of Paul (which is in many ways inaccurate), adding the notion of Original Sin (not found in Eastern Orthodox Christian theology). Then Luther takes that a step further and creates the dichotomy between law and grace, and basically re-interprets Roman Catholicism as a new form of Judaism, with the teachings of good works, merits, law, and so forth.
The minority voice of the embrace of pain, both by God and the human race, is never resolved. Traditional theology, both Jewish and Christian (and Muslim for that matter), basically overrided this distinction. The theological practice of theodicy--answering how there can be evil with a all-good, all-powerful God--basically asserts that that embrace of pain and the very question itself (whence evil? unde malum?) is a sign of lack of faith or outright sin. It is to return to the easy contractual theology.
Another sidenote: for those readers who think this is only a Western religious problem, note that the teaching of Karma is contractual theology, without a god-figure. The god-figure being replaced by the Law of Cause and Effect. Evil happens because you do evil.
Or New Age: Evil happens to you because you chosen to learn from it and allow it in. [I saw a young woman on Oprah yesterday who had been kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery when she was a teenager. Did she "invite" that experience in? Did she deserve that treatment because of some sin in a prior life? Was it just retribution for the sins of her fathers and mothers? Was it God's will?]
To embrace the pain and simply live in the unresolvedness of the question, this is the heart of the genius of the Biblical tradition. It changes both God and us. It is only medium in which we continually grow together.
And for Christianity, read according to the minority tradtion, the relationship becomes enfleshed, as God simply walks among us, enters the fray, accepts death, loves until the end, but offers no "great" synthesis. No final answer. Only an invitation: pick up your cross and follow me.
Live in the ambiguity. It is not that the contractual theology of karma-works is wrong, just incomplete. The Biblical narrative never overthrows the contractual-status quo theology for the minority strain. They live in constant tension.
And its clear which form of theology, if any, is left in the Churches, synagoues, and mosques of our day. How often do we hear that the embrace of pain is salvific?
We are not comfortable with that loss of finality, of fixity of position and perspective. We re-entrench. Our world is broken beyond belief, and daily exhaustion sets in among religious, political, social, cultural, economic institutions. Even the so-called counterculture is just as co-opted and dead. Plus the counter-counterculture. Them too.
The Vatican, rather than deal honestly with the issues of sexual abuse, scapegoats homosexuality. The Anglican tradition rather than practice compassion, is set to split, with each side (liberal and conservative) only agreeeing on one thing: its sad yes, but we're right, they are unwilling to see our position, and in the end good riddance.
Ever since the job in Vancouver fell apart, I had to be away from my love Chloe, and disconnected from my mission in life, I have tried to live in this brokeness, this embrace of pain--live the question itself.
It led to the experience of awakening to the Absolute Truth last July. It is now a semi-permanent "state of consciousness" (rather maybe the empty clearing, allowing any and all states).
But that has not answered the question. Enlightenment, so-called, is not an answer to anything, but simply a realization of where the question emerges from. The question remains and is still as ever unanswered.
Living with this open-endedness has been searing and beautiful. It also requires immense humility and incredible responsibility. No longer, is such an individual essentially worried about bad consequences to bad actions--at least from the perspective of some judgment after death. Jumping off a bridge will, however, still cause the person to die, but the moral fears and obsessions around decisions abates considerably.
In many ways I have felt of late I have failed to live in this open-endednes. That I have retracted to a position of personal mistakes.
I haven't not been particularly proud of myself of late. I don't know if this inner turmoil is the last gasp of the dominant-righteousness seeking, self-congratulating ego, or a more honest voice from my conscience--probably a little of both.
I spent so much time and effort attempting to realize the Absolute Truth, that I've struggled with the relative, particularly the realms of the intersubjective (and the interobjective). I have been returning to the Biblical narrative in an atttempt to re-learn the contours of the Relative Path, now infused more and more by the Absolute.
Swooping down with the View,
I climb the mountain of Cause and Effect.
--Padmashambhava
The mountain of Cause and Effect, in an Evolutionary, unfinished world, rife with such hatred, war, and poverty, beyond my ability to help all.
How then to help any?
Been reading Walter Bruggemann, a leading Old Testament scholar (he is a Christian, so I guess its kosher to say OT, even though that is a somewhat religiously prejudiced term....I don't imagine if I were Jewish I would be pleased having my scriptures referred to as "Old").
He talks about two main themes, or rather a dominant and minority strain in the Old Testament narrative.
The dominant strain is what he calls contractual theology. Contractual theology is the typical story we are told as kiddies of a god-in-the-sky who looks down on us, sees everything. If we do good we get rewarded, if we do badly, we are punished--a celestial Santa Claus if you will.
This theme clearly runs through the Old Testament with God smiting sinners left and right--raining down fire and brimestone on Sodom&Gomorrah, flooding the earth. Or combining the two, at least according to conservative American Christians, in flooding New Orleans because it was the modern day equivalent of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Bruggemann also points out that this "contractual theology" was a Middle Eastern-wide phenomena in the ancient world. The Jews didn't make it up in other words. This form of contractual theology with an absentee judgmental God has been used to justify social oppression from day one.
The paragon of this order-contractual theology in Biblical langauge is the Pharaonic court of Egypt. Pharoah, in Egyptian thought, is the Son of Ra on earth. The heavenly realm is typified as a court--with the Kingly high god and his courtiers (lesser demigods, angelic-like beings). Pharoah was not ever to be criticized because he is god's representative on earth--criticize the king and you criticize the divine. Bad move.
Pharoah owns all the land and keeps everyone in a state of practial slavery--and if Jewish up-front slavery. The only group that gets a free pass, in terms of grain donations and fundings, are of course the religious scholars, who thereby legitimize the system.
Now there is a minority tradition as well within the Old Testament. Bruggemann says that this minority tradition comes from the embrace of pain. There are moments where God, as the Bible describes "him", is jealous, sorry, grieves, cries, and is hurt, like a forgotten lover. God as it were moves beyond his own contractual setup.
And what is more interesting is that God seems to "act" or "change" only after humans have raged against the contractual system, calling God to the carpet. Moses pleads with God not to destroy the Isrealites after they worship the Golden Calf. Abraham manages to sway God's anger away from the destruction of a sinful town because there exist at least ten righteous people. God grieves after the Flood, and has chosen Noah because Noah alone is the one who is still loving.
The emblematic story of the minority tradition is of course the Exodus itself. God hears the cries of the oppressed Hebrews and is spurred to action. In fact, according to Bruggemann, the tradition running from Exodus through Deuteuronomy, Prophets (especially Jeremiah and Amos), and the Psalms is the tradition of the minority voice.
Isrealite history then becomes the story of the outsiders chosen who end up re-inventing the wheel of oppression, by instituting their own monarchy--under David and especially Solomon--with a temple, a cosmic-order contractual theology legitimizing the king through patronage of the religious temple clerics, and thereby oppressing the masses.
The Kings of Israel are Pharoah reborn.
And God knows Pharoah is alive and well today.
Christianity, to the degree that it continues Hebraic themes, is faced with the same mainline and minority tradition. The mainline tradition that supports the status quo of oppression--a mainline theology that describes Christ's incarnation in purely external supernatualistic terms. The contractual theology is still well in place.
Christianity is a religion of grace, in ways that the ancient Hebraic tradition I think it can be strongly argued is not. Its a tricky issue, but to try and symplify I would say that Rabbinic Judaism (the Judaism from the Fall of the Temple in 67 CE until today) and Christianity are two offshoots of the earlier pre-Rabbinic Jewish traditions.
I think both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity stayed true to many of the themes of the Hebrew Scriptures, but developed them in their own ways. Now of course both Orthodox Jews and mythic-membership Christians will disagree with me. That's fine. They both take their story literally and are the only "true" inheritors of the Biblical tradition.
But if we take a post-metaphysical standpoint and simply watch how the traditions co-construct their own religions, we notice an interesting shift.
For example, Rabbinic Judaism never interpreted the story of Adam&Eve eating the Apple in the Garden as a Cosmic Fall/Original Sin. There is no tradition like that in Rabbinic Talmudic Judaism. So it can't be argued that the story of Adam&Eve necessarily means a Fall. That is to privilege the Christian reading.
So Christinaity as a religion of grace is intimately tied into the notion of Fall-Original Sin. This construct, which is Pauline Christianity is not the theme of Rabbinic Judaism. Western theology takes Augustine's reading of Paul (which is in many ways inaccurate), adding the notion of Original Sin (not found in Eastern Orthodox Christian theology). Then Luther takes that a step further and creates the dichotomy between law and grace, and basically re-interprets Roman Catholicism as a new form of Judaism, with the teachings of good works, merits, law, and so forth.
The minority voice of the embrace of pain, both by God and the human race, is never resolved. Traditional theology, both Jewish and Christian (and Muslim for that matter), basically overrided this distinction. The theological practice of theodicy--answering how there can be evil with a all-good, all-powerful God--basically asserts that that embrace of pain and the very question itself (whence evil? unde malum?) is a sign of lack of faith or outright sin. It is to return to the easy contractual theology.
Another sidenote: for those readers who think this is only a Western religious problem, note that the teaching of Karma is contractual theology, without a god-figure. The god-figure being replaced by the Law of Cause and Effect. Evil happens because you do evil.
Or New Age: Evil happens to you because you chosen to learn from it and allow it in. [I saw a young woman on Oprah yesterday who had been kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery when she was a teenager. Did she "invite" that experience in? Did she deserve that treatment because of some sin in a prior life? Was it just retribution for the sins of her fathers and mothers? Was it God's will?]
To embrace the pain and simply live in the unresolvedness of the question, this is the heart of the genius of the Biblical tradition. It changes both God and us. It is only medium in which we continually grow together.
And for Christianity, read according to the minority tradtion, the relationship becomes enfleshed, as God simply walks among us, enters the fray, accepts death, loves until the end, but offers no "great" synthesis. No final answer. Only an invitation: pick up your cross and follow me.
Live in the ambiguity. It is not that the contractual theology of karma-works is wrong, just incomplete. The Biblical narrative never overthrows the contractual-status quo theology for the minority strain. They live in constant tension.
And its clear which form of theology, if any, is left in the Churches, synagoues, and mosques of our day. How often do we hear that the embrace of pain is salvific?
We are not comfortable with that loss of finality, of fixity of position and perspective. We re-entrench. Our world is broken beyond belief, and daily exhaustion sets in among religious, political, social, cultural, economic institutions. Even the so-called counterculture is just as co-opted and dead. Plus the counter-counterculture. Them too.
The Vatican, rather than deal honestly with the issues of sexual abuse, scapegoats homosexuality. The Anglican tradition rather than practice compassion, is set to split, with each side (liberal and conservative) only agreeeing on one thing: its sad yes, but we're right, they are unwilling to see our position, and in the end good riddance.
Ever since the job in Vancouver fell apart, I had to be away from my love Chloe, and disconnected from my mission in life, I have tried to live in this brokeness, this embrace of pain--live the question itself.
It led to the experience of awakening to the Absolute Truth last July. It is now a semi-permanent "state of consciousness" (rather maybe the empty clearing, allowing any and all states).
But that has not answered the question. Enlightenment, so-called, is not an answer to anything, but simply a realization of where the question emerges from. The question remains and is still as ever unanswered.
Living with this open-endedness has been searing and beautiful. It also requires immense humility and incredible responsibility. No longer, is such an individual essentially worried about bad consequences to bad actions--at least from the perspective of some judgment after death. Jumping off a bridge will, however, still cause the person to die, but the moral fears and obsessions around decisions abates considerably.
In many ways I have felt of late I have failed to live in this open-endednes. That I have retracted to a position of personal mistakes.
I haven't not been particularly proud of myself of late. I don't know if this inner turmoil is the last gasp of the dominant-righteousness seeking, self-congratulating ego, or a more honest voice from my conscience--probably a little of both.
I spent so much time and effort attempting to realize the Absolute Truth, that I've struggled with the relative, particularly the realms of the intersubjective (and the interobjective). I have been returning to the Biblical narrative in an atttempt to re-learn the contours of the Relative Path, now infused more and more by the Absolute.
Swooping down with the View,
I climb the mountain of Cause and Effect.
--Padmashambhava
The mountain of Cause and Effect, in an Evolutionary, unfinished world, rife with such hatred, war, and poverty, beyond my ability to help all.
How then to help any?
posted by CJ Smith @ 8:06 AM
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