Saturday, December 12, 2009

Genesis 8-10, or, There is no free lunch

I started Leon Kass's The Beginning of Wisdom this week, so, to a degree, that will probably be informing some of the next posts. His reading of Genesis -- which, at maybe page 12, I already kind of love -- places it in a philosophical rather than mythological or historical tradition. Hopefully, then, some of my upcoming posts won't have to dwell so much on apologetics -- the downside of reading through the lens of "This email fight I'm having with my atheist ex-boyfriend."

I especially appreciate the license to get away from arguments over carbon dating and the age of the earth and acknowledge the book itself. There is an inherent order and logic in these first chapters of Genesis that is wholly rejected by non-believers and tends to be overlooked by literal readers bent on establishing the physical reality of the non-human events in Genesis. This order is less present, maybe, in the cosmology of the creation story, but it's certainly there in the human stories: If you do right, are you not accepted?

The error, I think, in thinking of God as a control freak who lets us die because we deserve it, is that it personifies Him too much, too literally. God created the universe; I don't think He is wholly distinct from it. It is not a thing He made; in addition to its creation, He continues to be the source of life and nature. And -- as all but the most utopian sci-fi geeks will tell you, if you violate nature, either you, or it, has to go.

But if you depend on nature, if you can't exist without air to breathe and food to eat, there's no real choice, correct? If it comes down between your immediate well being and the order of the universe, one can survive without the other, and not vice versa.

I read this story of the Flood, here, as God torn because He wants to violate that order, because His love is such that He would forgive us anything, if it came down to that. Being omniscient, of course, He can't: you can't look the other way when you see everything. There's no sleight of hand to get away from the fact that man must die, or the perfect order on which he depends will be violated. God, who made the system in the first place, is a God who orders the world in a rational way. He can't make a system that isn't just, one in which actions have no consequences.

But then, look at His love, here, after the Flood. Like a parent for a child, on that parent's very best day, He is ready to let it go. His first conversation with Noah when they're off the boat is not about a moral or lesson; it's a gift and a promise.

God doesn't say, here, to stop sinning. He doesn't remind us of whose fault this was, or tell humanity to never do this again. He says, "Be fruitful and increase in number, and fill the Earth." There is no reservation about welcoming back onto His earth the creation that He had to wipe out because of its ugliness. He has an idea in his mind of the earth He created. And He knows that after a great deal of pain, things will be okay again. And He looks to that, rather than the imperfection and pain that is still to come. He sees what is good. The depth of this love is the best picture of what humanity can be. That we have any of this capacity for grace within us is the justification, I think, for our existence in the first place. It makes clear why God would work so hard to save us -- because as long as that spirit is possible, we carry in ourselves the possibility for this kind of beauty.

I think, too, that the sacrifice in this chapter is important. God understands here that it is not a moral good to be free from obligation -- that, without the reminder of dependence and reverence that ritual and sacrifice instill, humanity will fall away from Him even faster. It can't be taken for granted that humanity will stay close to its Creator, that His inarguable right to our worship will ensure it. He knows we need some understanding of the alternatives to His infinite goodness, or it won't mean anything to us. He knows that, by establishing a covenant, He gives us a role that will hopefully afford us the pride to stop abandoning Him, the sense of self to tolerate and appreciate our dependence on Him.

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