Devadatta
Well-Known Member
(The following really belongs in the Abrahamic garden, but thinking that some there might find it an unwelcome growth, I decided to plant it in a more unruly place.)
According to the Genesis account, why did God create human beings? In my outsider reading I get the sense of two distinct motives:
1. That God created human beings to serve Him.
2. That He created human beings to recognize Him.
The first motive appears to bear some affinity with the Mesopotamian creation stories that are thought to predate the biblical accounts. In at least some of these stories the gods are said to create human beings as slaves. So you have a recapitulation on the cosmic scale of prevailing social conditions; like earthly rulers, the gods need legions of minions to build their temples and ziggurats, make their sacrifices, etc. And the central need of every ruler, earthly or celestial, is obvious: they need obedience.
God in Genesis needs obedience too, and provides a little drama of obedience in illustration. But here obedience is taken out of its context, removed to the Neverland of Eden, to a purely moral plane, where obedience strictly speaking isn’t even necessary. The rulers and gods of Mesopotamia needed human beings to do things, perform actions, as part of the social/celestial economy. The God of Genesis – to the extent he escapes the usual trappings of a tribal god – doesn’t need human beings to do anything. He’s self-sufficient. And yet he demands obedience above all – or at least appears to.
Consider that while God demands obedience he makes disobedience impossible to avoid. That’s the story of the apple, the snake, the knowledge of good and evil and the fall. On an extra-biblical level this seems obviously an etiological myth explaining the emergence of discursive reasoning, the cognitive abilities that make us human but which abstract us, separate us from the primal unity, the direct, experiential contact with reality.
So in the extra-biblical sense, the “fall” is simply another parable for the human dilemma, for the sense of separation or alienation. But in the biblical narrative, in the biblical language, where obedience is both mandated and impossible, the fall must either be curse, or a blessing in disguise, a means to some other end.
Or both. For those who strive to obey when it’s impossible to obey, who see obedience as and end in itself, the fall and even the creation is a curse. For those who see obedience/disobedience as an inseparable pair, the fall creates a fruitful dilemma, a generative paradox, an instrument toward another end: the end of re-cognition.
This points to the second, more implicit of God’s motives in the Genesis account. God created human beings in his own image. (I’m sure BB will let me know if the original Hebrew presents a problem here!) Now an image is something you recognize yourself in, but it’s also something that looks back at you, that is other. And it seems pretty clear that it’s not simply a mirror image God is after. He wants the recognition to be mutual. The terms are necessarily reciprocal. After the fall, human beings need to recognize God (or to use a more universal phrase, ultimate or fundamental reality) as much as God needs to recognize the other and Himself in that other.
In this context, one can see the necessity of the fall. Before the fall, human beings are scarcely more than images. When God walks in the garden in the cool of evening before the fall, he is unlikely to meet the other he desires, the other His creation was meant to deliver. After the fall, he meets that other, or rather that other in its new self-awareness hides from Him. Theatrically, God feigns great displeasure, and the eternal game of hide and seek is on.
So here the point is not the superficial one of the necessity of free will, of choosing between good and evil, but the deeper necessity of the fall into duality as the precondition for the summum bonum of mutual recognition between human consciousness and ultimate reality.
For me, this God of Recognition is the universal side of the Abrahamic tradition, whose parallels are easily recognized in other major traditions, while the God of Obedience is culture-bound, restricted to a particular historical continuum and rooted in a particular geography, and whose preponderant emphasis on obedience above all else doesn’t fully translate into any other tradition.
This universal process of “recognition” of course takes many different forms, personal, impersonal, dualistic, non-dual, with a whole range of emotional colorings, from passionate to analytical, and employing a variety of means from engagement in the world to intense self/non-self cultivation, from commemorating recognition in great monuments and public works to disappearing from the world and into recognition itself. It all stems from what Abrahamic religion calls the “fall” and Buddhist tradition calls “precious human birth”, for in either case only fully human beings, in the Middle Earth of their duality, are capable of either salvation or enlightenment, or any other form of recognition.
Of course, in the history of Abrahamic religion, especially Christianity and Islam, it’s the God of Obedience who has made the most noise.
First, there’s Paul. For Paul the original sin is disobedience, and this sin is so deep, so vicious, so corrupting that compensatory obedience to the Law delivered by God to Moses can be no remedy. At best, it’s no more than a stopgap. In fact, the Law only brings sin more egregiously into view, defines it, and in a sense even brings it into existence. It can’t in itself conquer sin. The only remedy is the blood sacrifice of Jesus, who cancels the disobedience of Adam with the counterweight of his own obedience onto death.
So Paul recognizes that the Law, which is the fulfillment in scripture of God’s original call to obedience, is impossible to observe, in a literal sense. But he doesn’t recognize the Law as process, as practice, as a means for achieving re-cognition of God, and thus overcoming sin. Why? Because for Paul obedience itself is central. He defines his faith as obedience (see Romans, first chapter).
But doesn’t he say “only believe, and do as you like”, doesn’t he claim freedom in Christ? Sure, but this is your classic Pauline logical/emotional bind, beloved of so many evangelists ever since; for packed into this “only believe” is the collapse of faith into belief, and the groundwork for the Christian innovation of ideological conformity, the squeezing of metaphorical/metaphysical freedom into literalist creeds whose hallmark is absolute obedience. Paul, it seems to me, remains very much a Pharisee in precisely the way defined in the gospels, as someone fundamentally more interested in obedience to an ideology than in recognition of God.
Now our principle window onto Jesus are the synoptic gospels shaped by orthodoxy and by the Pauline faction, and yet even there he stands in fundamental contrast to Paul. He doesn’t toss the Law to the margins. Every word of it still stands, he says. Instead, he proclaims the essence of the Law as practice: the love of God, and the love of others - and love of course is a deep form of recognition. The formal Law stands, not as the master but as the servant of human beings. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
And unlike Paul, Jesus is not proclaiming a new ideology or founding a new religion. He’s a radical Jewish preacher affirming the God of recognition over the God of obedience. He’s proclaiming the truth as he sees it, first of all to his fellow Jews, and then to anyone who will listen.
It’s a truth he’s willing to die for. In fact, he feels that God has called him to this ultimate sacrifice for the truth of the Law. But does he see himself as a blood sacrifice, as atonement for some shadowy, metaphysical notion of original sin? Does he see God, whom he recognizes intimately as a father, as requiring his hideous torture and death in payment for some distant act of disobedience? This same radical preacher who cured the sick and harvested grain on the Sabbath? Even the synoptic gospels shaped by orthodoxy never have Jesus remotely saying these things.
Of course the common defense of Paul is that without his coercive and divisive theology there would have been no Christianity. I think now that the question is open, that absent the dominance of Paul a more modest and sensible Christianity might very well have taken root as the orthodox line. In any case, despite Pauline orthodoxy, other more modest and sensible Christianities and Jesus himself have indeed managed to survive, and in Christianity broadly speaking the God of recognition has happily lived on to subvert the God of obedience.
Finally, there’s Islam, currently the strongest bastion of the God of obedience. I don’t think its acute dissonance with modernity is any accident. Consider that it begins with Muhammad’s claim to reboot the whole tradition from Abraham, and with it a redoubled emphasis on the God of obedience, as any straightforward reading of the Koran reveals. But perhaps the real calamity was the way it expanded out of the Arabian peninsula; falling into the vacuums of the aging Byzantine and Iranian empires, it became an empire itself, settling at length in Baghdad, ironically returning the Abrahamic tradition full circle to its Mesopotamian origins, and with its succession of Caliphates to the despotic rule all the prophets had railed against.
So my sense is that Islam, more than any other faith, labors against an enormous historical burden, presided over by the God of obedience. I realize as well that Islam is diverse, that it has many potential resources to draw from, many accomplishments to point to, that it’s capable of transformation. I’m in no position to judge the odds of success. But for people who really care about Islam, my variety of not terribly friendly analysis, however ill-informed it might be, in the end may be more useful than the usual well-meaning apologetics.
Shanti?
According to the Genesis account, why did God create human beings? In my outsider reading I get the sense of two distinct motives:
1. That God created human beings to serve Him.
2. That He created human beings to recognize Him.
The first motive appears to bear some affinity with the Mesopotamian creation stories that are thought to predate the biblical accounts. In at least some of these stories the gods are said to create human beings as slaves. So you have a recapitulation on the cosmic scale of prevailing social conditions; like earthly rulers, the gods need legions of minions to build their temples and ziggurats, make their sacrifices, etc. And the central need of every ruler, earthly or celestial, is obvious: they need obedience.
God in Genesis needs obedience too, and provides a little drama of obedience in illustration. But here obedience is taken out of its context, removed to the Neverland of Eden, to a purely moral plane, where obedience strictly speaking isn’t even necessary. The rulers and gods of Mesopotamia needed human beings to do things, perform actions, as part of the social/celestial economy. The God of Genesis – to the extent he escapes the usual trappings of a tribal god – doesn’t need human beings to do anything. He’s self-sufficient. And yet he demands obedience above all – or at least appears to.
Consider that while God demands obedience he makes disobedience impossible to avoid. That’s the story of the apple, the snake, the knowledge of good and evil and the fall. On an extra-biblical level this seems obviously an etiological myth explaining the emergence of discursive reasoning, the cognitive abilities that make us human but which abstract us, separate us from the primal unity, the direct, experiential contact with reality.
So in the extra-biblical sense, the “fall” is simply another parable for the human dilemma, for the sense of separation or alienation. But in the biblical narrative, in the biblical language, where obedience is both mandated and impossible, the fall must either be curse, or a blessing in disguise, a means to some other end.
Or both. For those who strive to obey when it’s impossible to obey, who see obedience as and end in itself, the fall and even the creation is a curse. For those who see obedience/disobedience as an inseparable pair, the fall creates a fruitful dilemma, a generative paradox, an instrument toward another end: the end of re-cognition.
This points to the second, more implicit of God’s motives in the Genesis account. God created human beings in his own image. (I’m sure BB will let me know if the original Hebrew presents a problem here!) Now an image is something you recognize yourself in, but it’s also something that looks back at you, that is other. And it seems pretty clear that it’s not simply a mirror image God is after. He wants the recognition to be mutual. The terms are necessarily reciprocal. After the fall, human beings need to recognize God (or to use a more universal phrase, ultimate or fundamental reality) as much as God needs to recognize the other and Himself in that other.
In this context, one can see the necessity of the fall. Before the fall, human beings are scarcely more than images. When God walks in the garden in the cool of evening before the fall, he is unlikely to meet the other he desires, the other His creation was meant to deliver. After the fall, he meets that other, or rather that other in its new self-awareness hides from Him. Theatrically, God feigns great displeasure, and the eternal game of hide and seek is on.
So here the point is not the superficial one of the necessity of free will, of choosing between good and evil, but the deeper necessity of the fall into duality as the precondition for the summum bonum of mutual recognition between human consciousness and ultimate reality.
For me, this God of Recognition is the universal side of the Abrahamic tradition, whose parallels are easily recognized in other major traditions, while the God of Obedience is culture-bound, restricted to a particular historical continuum and rooted in a particular geography, and whose preponderant emphasis on obedience above all else doesn’t fully translate into any other tradition.
This universal process of “recognition” of course takes many different forms, personal, impersonal, dualistic, non-dual, with a whole range of emotional colorings, from passionate to analytical, and employing a variety of means from engagement in the world to intense self/non-self cultivation, from commemorating recognition in great monuments and public works to disappearing from the world and into recognition itself. It all stems from what Abrahamic religion calls the “fall” and Buddhist tradition calls “precious human birth”, for in either case only fully human beings, in the Middle Earth of their duality, are capable of either salvation or enlightenment, or any other form of recognition.
Of course, in the history of Abrahamic religion, especially Christianity and Islam, it’s the God of Obedience who has made the most noise.
First, there’s Paul. For Paul the original sin is disobedience, and this sin is so deep, so vicious, so corrupting that compensatory obedience to the Law delivered by God to Moses can be no remedy. At best, it’s no more than a stopgap. In fact, the Law only brings sin more egregiously into view, defines it, and in a sense even brings it into existence. It can’t in itself conquer sin. The only remedy is the blood sacrifice of Jesus, who cancels the disobedience of Adam with the counterweight of his own obedience onto death.
So Paul recognizes that the Law, which is the fulfillment in scripture of God’s original call to obedience, is impossible to observe, in a literal sense. But he doesn’t recognize the Law as process, as practice, as a means for achieving re-cognition of God, and thus overcoming sin. Why? Because for Paul obedience itself is central. He defines his faith as obedience (see Romans, first chapter).
But doesn’t he say “only believe, and do as you like”, doesn’t he claim freedom in Christ? Sure, but this is your classic Pauline logical/emotional bind, beloved of so many evangelists ever since; for packed into this “only believe” is the collapse of faith into belief, and the groundwork for the Christian innovation of ideological conformity, the squeezing of metaphorical/metaphysical freedom into literalist creeds whose hallmark is absolute obedience. Paul, it seems to me, remains very much a Pharisee in precisely the way defined in the gospels, as someone fundamentally more interested in obedience to an ideology than in recognition of God.
Now our principle window onto Jesus are the synoptic gospels shaped by orthodoxy and by the Pauline faction, and yet even there he stands in fundamental contrast to Paul. He doesn’t toss the Law to the margins. Every word of it still stands, he says. Instead, he proclaims the essence of the Law as practice: the love of God, and the love of others - and love of course is a deep form of recognition. The formal Law stands, not as the master but as the servant of human beings. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
And unlike Paul, Jesus is not proclaiming a new ideology or founding a new religion. He’s a radical Jewish preacher affirming the God of recognition over the God of obedience. He’s proclaiming the truth as he sees it, first of all to his fellow Jews, and then to anyone who will listen.
It’s a truth he’s willing to die for. In fact, he feels that God has called him to this ultimate sacrifice for the truth of the Law. But does he see himself as a blood sacrifice, as atonement for some shadowy, metaphysical notion of original sin? Does he see God, whom he recognizes intimately as a father, as requiring his hideous torture and death in payment for some distant act of disobedience? This same radical preacher who cured the sick and harvested grain on the Sabbath? Even the synoptic gospels shaped by orthodoxy never have Jesus remotely saying these things.
Of course the common defense of Paul is that without his coercive and divisive theology there would have been no Christianity. I think now that the question is open, that absent the dominance of Paul a more modest and sensible Christianity might very well have taken root as the orthodox line. In any case, despite Pauline orthodoxy, other more modest and sensible Christianities and Jesus himself have indeed managed to survive, and in Christianity broadly speaking the God of recognition has happily lived on to subvert the God of obedience.
Finally, there’s Islam, currently the strongest bastion of the God of obedience. I don’t think its acute dissonance with modernity is any accident. Consider that it begins with Muhammad’s claim to reboot the whole tradition from Abraham, and with it a redoubled emphasis on the God of obedience, as any straightforward reading of the Koran reveals. But perhaps the real calamity was the way it expanded out of the Arabian peninsula; falling into the vacuums of the aging Byzantine and Iranian empires, it became an empire itself, settling at length in Baghdad, ironically returning the Abrahamic tradition full circle to its Mesopotamian origins, and with its succession of Caliphates to the despotic rule all the prophets had railed against.
So my sense is that Islam, more than any other faith, labors against an enormous historical burden, presided over by the God of obedience. I realize as well that Islam is diverse, that it has many potential resources to draw from, many accomplishments to point to, that it’s capable of transformation. I’m in no position to judge the odds of success. But for people who really care about Islam, my variety of not terribly friendly analysis, however ill-informed it might be, in the end may be more useful than the usual well-meaning apologetics.
Shanti?
