Thursday, February 11, 2016

A Post For The First Ordinary Day of Lent

Last week I recommended the book by Walter Brueggemann, "The Bible Makes Sense".  It is a presentation of the Bible which isn't anything like most people have ever been exposed to, it is an amazingly deep reading of the text and the context of those documents and why they are as meaningful today as they ever were.  It is nothing that any atheist I've ever come across nor any facile fundamentalist could begin to deal with through their accustomed methods.  I can't read it without wishing I had seen it forty years ago when it was first published, it or something similar to it.  I'd have saved a lot of time.

The book isn't merely a book it is a curriculum to be followed as an introduction to that way of reading the collection and finding out what it means.  There are questions to be answered and passages to think deeply about.  The first chapter ends with questions about God as a maker of covenants.  If you think that that refers to the covenant made with the Jewish people through Abraham, alone, the first passage to think about shows that even before that in the book, the covenant making was far more inclusive.  Genesis 9 8-17

8 Later, God told Noah and his sons, 9 “Pay attention! I’m establishing my covenant with you and with your descendants after you, 10 and with every living creature that is with you—the flying creatures, the livestock, and all the wildlife of the earth that are with you—all the earth’s animals that came out of the ark. 11 I will establish my covenant with you: No living beings will ever be cut off again by flood waters, and there will never again be a flood that destroys the earth.”

12 God also said, “Here’s the symbol that represents the covenant that I’m making between me and you and every living being with you, for all future generations: 13 I’ve set my rainbow in the sky to symbolize the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow becomes visible in the clouds, 15 I’ll remember my covenant between me and you and every living creature, so that water will never again become a flood to destroy all living beings. 16 When the rainbow is in the clouds, I will observe it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living beings on the earth.”

17 God also told Noah, “This is the symbol of the covenant that I’ve established between me and everything that lives on the earth.”

Now, that's a radically inclusive list, in the context of the story it is a covenant which includes not only all people but all animals, perhaps more in that it says "all the flying creatures, the livestock and all of the wildlife of the earth" are included in a covenantal relationship with God and are part of God's concern.   You have to wonder what a deep and effective consideration of that idea would have in the relationship of people and the natural world if it were taken seriously by most people.  If the various People of the Book, Jews, Christians, Muslims, took that idea seriously it would have altered world history in a way that the present world would be totally different.  That, alone, could take up a good week of your time to scratch the surface of it.

It's not going to be any surprise to you that I believe that thinking of the world in those terms is superior to the debased view of life that materialist reductionism and Darwinist natural selection produces.  If all animals, all people are in a covenant relationship with God then the crude hierarchy assumed by the victory of the "fittest" conferring an ersatz worthiness is a delusion.

Given that if there is an extinction of life on Earth it will almost certainly be the work of human beings using nuclear technology, extraction technology, the products of the sciences those were created by, perhaps the alternative contemplated above might make "The Bible (as seen in this way) Works"  would be an apt title for it.  And now excuse me while I ignore the wailing and gnashing of teeth that are sure to come.

No comments:

Post a Comment