Fw: "In the beginning": reading Gen. 1 with John 1.1-18 as the interpretative text

[Willis E. Elliott]

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Willis E. Elliott

To: confessi...@googlegroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2012 7:49 PM

Subject: Re: "In the beginning": reading Gen. 1 with John 1.1-18 as the interpretative text

Herb

 

I like your skill at bringing people & traditions together in a "chat."

In your Genesis chat, the chatters (you say) "don't share a common language."  The God-given common language to be shared when talking Genesis is Hebrew.   

 

Now let's get down to why Willis "assumes there is a right way."  My PhD oral in Hebrew faced three white-bearded rabbis for some hours (2 or 3, I can't remember which), & my fate depended on which way the beards moved more - up/down or sideways.  Taking turns, they asked me to find / read aloud / translate passages - & would stop me on a particular word to ask me its chronological semenes (meanings in successive historical periods) & the main sememe in the passage's particular period.  Precision: either I did, or did not, know the "right way".  Yes, Herb, I "assumed" there was a right way & that these masters knew it; & during the oral, they never disagreed among themselves as to what was the RIGHT or BEST way.  Their other main concern was Sprachgefuehl (feeling for / in / through the Hebrew language - so when you read the Hebrew Scriptures, you feel instead of only thinking.  Yes, Herb, I "assume" there's right feeling as well as right thinking. 

 

I passed the oral, but not as well as I passed the Greek oral.  Greek is a far more precise language than is Hebrew.  As Jane know, there's a right way to translate Jn.1.1 ("the Word was God"), & the other ways (e.g., "...divine") are wrong (as was proved by my first U.Chicago PhD mentor, Ernest Cadman Colwell).  Now, Herb, everybody in the know knows that Colwell was right & everybody disagreeing wih him was wrong.  I find it distressing that your sernse of right/wrong in hermeneutics is so weak.

 

Finally, a bit of info.  Immediately after your comment on me, you mention that Jim & you have had pastoral experience - as though I'd not.  I came to the attention of the UCC national staff, & was hired thereon, because of my creative achievements in a long pastorate.

 

Grace and peace--

Willis

 

 ----- Original Message -----

From: Herb Davis /*+-

To: confessi...@googlegroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2012 10:04 AM

Subject: Re: "In the beginning": reading Gen. 1 with John 1.1-18 as the interpretative text

Dear Jane, Jim, Ted, Scott,  I still haven’t gotten to the sermon note since you folks have sent me back to look at Gen. I don’t think any of us read Gen  literally but we do read Gen out of different traditions and we bring different cultural values to any reading.  I agree with Jane that no one comes to a text pure.  We all have baggage and it is good to have that baggage up front.  The difficulty is that in our time there is no certainty that we share the same values or work out of the same tradition.  It is difficult for us to chat because we don’t share a common language and we need to keep trying to learn second languages.  I can understand Scott’s difficulty in reading these texts and with the language that some of us use, yet he always pushes me to rethink my position.  That is always true of Ted who has some wonderful ways of unpacking text.  Jane also added and forces to look again at John 1 in a different way.  I love John one.  My disagreement with Willis is he assumes there is a right way.  Jim and I are closer since we share to some degree a common tradition Barth, Calvin.  We both preach or preached weekly and lived in a parish.  I think we both enjoy but also distrust the liberal culture.  Take for examples the value words, “Family Values” that Jane uses in her note.  Family values when used by conservative Christians are viewed by the more elite as a way of putting women back in the kitchen.  Family values as viewed by evangelical maybe more about faithful marriage and care of children.  Who know what Newt means by family values.  Evangelical’s look at what they see as the breakdown of family while liberal look at the way family limits and enslaves and hurts people.  We use family values to hit the enemy over the head.  What does Eph.5:21 say about family values?  I liked what Ted said about Gal. rescinding Gen.3:14ff, great way of seeing the work of Christ.  What was wonderful about this chat was there was an attempt to look at a text and make points and not destroy each other.  What maybe the result since we have no common language is that the texts no longer have much power.

 

I was amazed how sex and reproduction was removed from the Gen 1 text and that we did not look at Gen 2, which seems to say to me that nothing can ease man’s loneliness, not God, not the best friend a dog, nothing in the creation, it might imply not another man, something new must enter creation, a surprise , a woman.  Brueggemann suggest that the vision of human community is man and woman together.  Jane and Ted don’t deal with this possibility.  The creation isn’t complete in Gen.1-2:4.  Ted makes us remember that these are complex texts and we need to be careful.  I enjoyed but did not fully understand the chat with Jim on male and female.  Brueggeman suggested that the image of God is seen in Phil. 2, the man who does not grasp at divinity.

But on Gen.1:27ff Von Rad suggest that we are talking about reproduction .

 

I too love John 1:10: :He was in the world and the world came into being through him;” but there is the sense that there is something missing, something surprising, something unbelievable, “ yet the world did not know him.”  How do you deal with that mystery?  We do not know our maker.  We come to know him not through our sex, or our flesh or our creation but by receiving, believing the one who does not grasp. 

I think our chatting has helped me to see more clearly that one who believes, receives and confesses Jesus as Lord is my brother or sister in Christ, regardless of sexual orientation.  At the same time our chat has not convinced that the vision of Gen 1 and 2 is same sex marriage. 

 

Finally a note to Jane on heaven.  It is good to remember that heaven is created and the two of them will someday end in a new heaven and a new earth where all tears will be wiped away and we will see more clerly.

 

Herb

 

 

 

Sent: Monday, May 14, 2012 7:07 AM

To: confessi...@googlegroups.com

Subject: "In the beginning": reading Gen. 1 with John 1.1-18 as the interpretative text

 

Dear colleagues,

To answer Herb's question about which tradition one is writing in, I am writing to you in the tradition of the early Church Fathers, up through the late fourth and early fifth centuries. 

Herb, as much as you know that I love you, it's not a very nice shot to accuse Scott of spiritualizing the text of Genesis. That is a shot that has been done in recent decades, especially by Colin Gunton, who accused Origen of allegorizing the text of Genesis, which Origen certainly did, and who also accused Augustine for Augustine's ways of approaching the text.  Gunton had a slight preference for the way Basil of Caesarea and the other Cappadocians read Gen. 1, but he still criticizes Basil for not having enough of a trinitarian view of the six days of creation, in Basil's hexaemeral homilies.  For Gunton, the third-century Irenaeus is usually the hero when it comes to early trinitarian thinking and thinking about Genesis and the creation accounts. But guess what?   Even this hero very seldom wrote about the six days of creation or the early verses of Gen. 1.  Irenaeus usually focused on Gen. 1.26-27 and then the second creation account, which begins in the second chapter of Genesis.  He especially liked Gen. 2.7, where 'the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life..."   I've done a whole rift on the word translated as "formed" here.  It would be interesting for another day.  And I know that Willis loves this verse for other reasons, more focused on the breath of life. 

 

But, the point is, Gen. 1 was rarely read or interpreted literally in the early centuries of church history, including by our heroes of the faith.  They knew way back then that one cannot take Gen. 1 literally and that the text offers a lot of challenges.  But they also very much wanted to try to understand Gen. 1.  A huge crop of commentaries on Genesis and sermons on the six days of creation appeared in the early centuries, and people like Basil and his brother, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom and Augustine and others, including people in the Syrian tradition whose works are just now being dealt with in English, tried to interpret Gen. 1, literally or allegorically.  They of course read Genesis christologically, and with trinitarian eyes, which I suggest is appropriate for us too. 

 

One issue that Basil, Augustine, Chrysostom, and others were hung up on is that early verses of Gen. 1 seem to say that God created two heavens.  What's up with that?  Two heavens? If you take the text literally, as Basil and Augustine tried to do, you get caught up in twists and turns.  Augustine ended up arguing way, way too long about their being a 'heaven of heavens', which comes from the Psalms.  This heaven's heaven was over the heaven that we know, making two heavens.  Basil had to do some juggling on this issue in his homilies, which he preached to lay people of mixed backgrounds.  His hexaemeral homilies are old fashioned, of course, but they make good reading, and he loved the variety of God's creation.  He drew on as much science and philosophy as he could, while sticking to the Bible.  Augustine also did his best, although he can go on and on and on.  He's my main man, though, so I will be defending him later on.  But how many of you, when you take apart Gen. 1 literally, are going to spend time figuring out why the text suggests that there are two heavens?  I don't think you'll focus your energy there!

 

Gen. 1 was not read literally way back then, by the fathers of the church, who are saints today, and who left us a legacy in their writings, theological doctrines, and the words of some creeds.  And theologians do not do their work today by reading the Bible literally, or trying to prove the point of doctrines by doing proof-texting from selected passages.  They look at the witness of the Church and churches throughout the centuries, as well as at the Bible and other resources.  Gabe has written all about that!

 

If we are going to talk about interpreting Genesis in this forum, then I suggest one way of doing it is to read Gen. 1 by using John 1.1-18 (the prologue to John) as an interpretive text.  This is a time honored tradition, and the prologue to John may itself be a midrash on Gen. 1.1-5, and it may use Prov. 8.22-31 as one of its own interpretative texts. 

One of the verses from the prologue to John with the greatest impact in the early centuries of Church history, and the period when the doctrines of creation and the Trinity were formulated, is John 1.3:  'All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.'  

The next verse after that is, in some translations:  'What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.' 

So, here we learn, for our discussions today, that ALL THINGS and ALL PEOPLE came into being through Jesus Christ. We don't hear anything about male and female, gay or straight, black or white or Asian or Indian or other, Jew or Greek, etc. etc. etc.   Pretty simple.  God the Father made all things with and through his eternal Son, and all things were given life. 

 

Then there is John 1.12, which is very powerful for our discussion here:  'But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or the will of man, but of God.'  

 

WOW  When it says 'not of the will of man', some translators think 'man' means a 'husband', so this is very blunt. We do not become children of God through the desires of a husband and what men and women do together in the act of procreation. 

So all things were created through the Word, the Son, Jesus Christ:  that is all things.  And what it means to be children of God takes on a non-biological meaning.  We can't do more on this here, but certainly we also read in the other gospels that Jesus redefined what it meant to be family:  he was not as interested in his biological relatives as in other people who believed in him and were trying to do the will of his Father.  What people call 'family values' today is not something that can be argued for, based on the gospels! 

 

So, is the author of the prologue guilty of spiritualizing Genesis?  The author is pretty tangible about things.  He goes on to say that the Word became flesh and set up his tent among us.  And the rest is history, as they say.  Real history.  Not spiritualized thinking. 

And the author says:  'From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.  The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.  No one has ever seen God.  It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.'  (John 1.16-18, NRSV)

This is how I read Gen. 1:  through the lens of John 1.1-18.  I am staking my academic life on this and am immersed in reading early church writings about creation and the Trinity.  But for my pastoral role, and my daily life in the church, I can also see that John 1.1-18 is a very inclusive text, with a very inclusive understanding of creation and re-creation and the life that is given to all people, because  the Word or Son or Jesus Christ physically came into the world, our world, and took on flesh, flesh like our flesh, only of a different skin color than the flesh that most of us in this forum have. 

If the Word or Son came into the world to give life to all people, and all people can be non-biological children of God, and if all people have received grace upon grace, and if Moses brought the law and Jesus brought grace to go with the law, I think we can view Gen. 1 (and other favorite passages of ours that we like to draw on to bolster our arguments) in a different light.  We don't have to read Gen. 1 literally.  We should read it through the lens of what we have learned about the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Son who was and is and always will be close to the Father's heart, and who makes the Father known to us.   What does Jesus Christ teach us about the issues we are arguing about, and how we might understand the profound words of the first book of Genesis in light of those teachings?  We don't go back to the very beginning, without trying to understand it through the one who changed what the beginning, and middle, and end mean. 

 

So, I am sure no one has made it this far in this long posting.  But at least I am contributing to the proposed task of doing different exegesis on Gen. 1.

 

And, by the way, given that I have to write my dissertation according to UK standards, my quotation marks and commas and citations of Bible verse are mostly in the UK style, except for when I forget!

 

Jane

 

 

 

[Herb Davis]

Dear Willis,  You make an interesting point when you say, “The God-given common language to be shared when talking Genesis is Hebrew.”  I have to think about that.  I wasn’t taking about Genesis when I mentioned the last of a common language or common tradition.  I was talking about Jane’s use of “family values” in relationship to the discussion of sexuality.  I don’t believe the words “family values” mean the same thing to people from different traditions.  I was thinking more of Alasdair MacIntyre in his book, “Whose Justice?”  where he talks about different language in different traditions and the need to learn the language of the tradition.  I think part of our difficulty is the liberal and conservatives use different language and we often misunderstand each other.  Michael Sandel in his essay, “Justice, What’s the Right Thing to Do?” points out the different values or understanding of different systems of justice.  We capture of little of that in the Ron Paul/Paul Ryan discussion of budget with Obama.  They are speaking from different traditions or places. 

 

On your second point “the right way to understand scripture” you maybe right, but the discussion on “God created them male and female” did not result in much agreement.  Are you saying we can know what is being said in the text but we may differ on the application?  Help me in this text.  Herb  

[Willis E. Elliott]

Dear Herb

 

In the wider sense, we were on the same page - as your "we need to learn the language of the tradition" (MacIntyre).  The languages of your "Subject" are Hebrew & Greek, to which I spoke in response to you.

 

Yes to Michael Sandel's point & your application of it.  (Have you heard him [on TV] teach?  A master!)

 

Yes to your question "Are you saying we can know what is being said in the text but we may differ on the application?"

You remember the creative page-design of the 12-vol. THE  INTERPRETER'S BIBLE: above the line, what it meant (exegesis); below, what it means (exposition).  It pains me when a matter of fact is treated as though it were a matter of opinion.  (Those three white beards of my rabbi examiners would move side to side.)

 

As an orthodox Christian, I accept the Christological reading of the OT, without which we Christians wouldn't have the OT in our Bible (as Muslims don't have it in the Qur'an).  But ancient literature is to be read/heard for its "original intent" as well as by later eyes/ears.  (J.Pelikan's last contribution to hermeneutics was the comparing of "original intent" in biblical & u.s.constitutional studies.)