Christians appropriated the Jewish
Scriptures as a witness to a covenant of Law between God and Israel. Influenced by Paul's tortured efforts to justify
his conversion from Judaism, they argued, polemically, that this Covenant was
both fulfilled and abrogated by the new covenant signed and sealed by the
Incarnation of the eternal Word.
In its own right, the Jewish Scriptures are
a sprawling text stitched together by Scribes (redactors) in Babylon. The primary criterion for inclusion in the
text seems to have been a determination to ensure that nothing in Israel's
literary tradition be lost. Since the
compilation preserved texts written over the course of four centuries, it can
be read in many ways. Here, I offer a
reading informed by an admittedly selective literary code.
The code in question notes that the ancient
Israelites used stories to process Israel's historical experience as God's Chosen
People. In that vein, it approaches
these stories as literature, not history.
For its critical apparatus, it invokes a dictum of the history of
religions which asserts that the idea of God in any age reflects the conception
of the world, the prevailing social or political structures, and the
understanding of what it is to be human encoded in the language of the day.
Read through this code, the early stories
differ radically from the myths and epics of Israel's neighbors. The latter are narratives which trace the
prevailing culture to acts of deities or heroes in a timeless past. In marked contrast, the stories of the
Yahwist and the Elohists trace the origin of Israel as God's Chosen People to
the entry of an uncanny deity into human history at assignable places and times
through words spoken immediately to unique individuals. But they still endow the deity with
anthropomorphic traits. He is
capricious, impulsive, and prone to eruptions of jealousy and anger. Moreover, he works immediately in the forces
of nature, hurling fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah, sending plagues on
the Egyptians, and parting the waters of the Red Sea. In some touching passages, however, he is
involved with Israel's patriarchs and matriarchs in intensely personal ways.
The Yahwist's story of words which sent
Abraham forth on a journey into the unknown included a categorical institution
of a covenant between God and Abraham and his descendants. Later stories imposed a conditional form of
the covenant which, in effect, transformed it into a contractual relationship,
not an intensely personal involvement.
On its part, the conditional formulation generated the belief that God
rewards those who observe the terms of the contract and punishes those who
transgress the boundaries it imposes. In
turn, the belief that the Law defined the positive and distinctive identity of
Israel as God's Chosen People inscribed a different conception of God. Though this God remained wrathful, he acted
justly rather than capriciously in the rewards and punishments he
distributed. (Since this tradition took
the promises of land, prosperity and many offspring literally, this God, too,
worked immediately in and through natural forces and peoples who worshipped
pagan deities.)
Nonetheless, the notion of justice which
entered the dialogue which processed Israel's historical existence was
inherently flawed. Thus, in Exodus,
the formula, "an eye for an eye, and
a tooth for a tooth", marked an advance from a culture in which the
powers-that-be could extract an eye from one who injured them, but did not
suffer the same fate for injuries they inflicted on others. Centuries later, however, its limitations
were exposed by the metaphors of intimacy projected by the prophets to describe
God's involvement with individual Israelites.
(Aside: Despite Jesus' rejection of this formula,
Christians who support capital punishment invoke it as biblical warrant for
their insistence that a murderer deserves to be executed by the state. Presumably, this execution restores some
moral order and assuages the grief of the family of the murder victim. From my perspective, the "moral
order" in question is barbaric, and the promise of closure is illusory. And from a Christian perspective, this use of
the notion of justice ignores Jesus' call to enter the painful process of
forgiveness.)
These metaphors of intimacy replace the
language of justice with a language of love.
Thus, for the metaphor which compared God's involvement with individual Israelites
to a marriage union, Hosea drew on his personal experience. He had married a temple prostitute who
continued to ply her trade. As the names
he gave to the children borne to her indicated, he first wanted to punish and
later wanted to abandon her. When he
discovered that he still loved her, he began to understand that God loved
flawed human beings with an ever-faithful and all-inclusive love. And as he articulated this insight, he
assured the Israelites who would be sent into exile that God was not punishing
or abandoning them. In so doing, he
replaced the belief that a just God rewarded the good and punished the evil
with the belief that God was willing to be intimately involved in the everyday
events in the lives of all human beings.
And in this vision, invoking justice as a moral notion is simply
irrelevant. Love is not a matter of
keeping score or applying moral algebra.
Only Second and Third Isaiah invoked
Hosea's comparison of the covenant with marriage union explicitly. But all the great prophets insisted that the
call implicit in God's intimate involvement with individuals could be heard in
the cries of the oppressed, the dispossessed, the marginalized, the silenced,
the outcast and the stranger. In its
urgency, this call recovered the categorical formulation of the Covenant from
the hold of the conditional version in which the Law functioned as a mediator
between God and Israel.
This reading, I suggest, undermines (1)
Paul's reduction of God's involvement with Israel to a Covenant of Law, (2)
Augustine's misreading of the story of Adam and Eve as an historical event
which forced divine justice to demand the sacrificial death of God's own Son in
reparation for Adam's transgression, (3) the traditional meta-narrative which traces
the Incarnation to an interplay between divine justice and divine mercy, (4)
Aquinas' conception of God as a rational and purposive Creator who inscribed
his moral will in the natural order, (5) the polar opposition between faith and
works which supports Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone, and (6)
Barth's replacement of the interplay between justice and mercy with an
interplay between God's wrath and God's mercy.
And since all six invoke a language of expiation and redemption, that
language becomes suspect, at the very least.
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