Jobian Existentialism

Robert M. Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought: The Jewish Experience in History (New York: MacMillan, 1980) 143.

Seltzer discusses various viewpoints on God’s whirlwind speech in the Book of Job. The final one that he presents is that of Matitiahu Tsevat. I’ll call it the “existential view”: life makes no sense, but you do what you can to get by and love others.

In the friends’ insistence that Job’s suffering meant he had sinned, and in Job’s demanding a specific reason why he, in his innocence, should suffer, both sides had presumed the reality of reward and punishment in the cosmos. Perhaps, however, the voice from the whirlwind is asserting that there is no such law of retribution and that nature is neutral to man’s moral action. The sun rises on the righteous and sinner alike (28:13, 15). Rain falls on the desert, whereas it could have been directed only to the cultivated land where it is needed by men (38:26-27). Wild animals do not observe the tenets of human morality (38:15-16). Accordingly, God’s speech can be construed to imply that material prosperity and misfortune do not constitute divine recompense or chastisement. Tsevat proposed that only the concept of a cosmic order that does not operate according to a built-in principle of moral retribution makes possible the selfless piety that was the first issue posed by the book of Job. “It would be a grave error to interpret [the book's] denial of divine retribution as constituting a legitimate excuse for man from his obligations to establish justice on earth. Justice is not woven into the stuff of the universe nor is God occupied with its administration, but it is an ideal to be realized by society.” The author of Job may be denying one fundamental assumption of the narrative and prophetic books of the Bible, but his denial is consistent with another, even more fundamental assumption: that it is up to man to carry out God’s commandments and that his primary task must be done in society and actualized in the course of history. A principle of reward and punishment would, in fact, be a form of coercion, leaving no special realm in which man could exercise his moral freedom by doing the good from purely disinterested motives.

The Excluded (Yet Loved) Gibeonites

My weekly quiet time for this week was in II Samuel 21. There, David hands over two sons and five grandsons of Saul to the Gibeonites so they can hang them. Saul during his reign had killed several Gibeonites, Amorites whom Joshua had sworn to spare from annihilation (Joshua 9-10). Consequently, the Gibeonites want their revenge on Saul and his bloody house. And God is eager for Saul's injustice to be corrected, for God sends a famine as punishment on Israel.

I like what the Encyclopedia Judaica article "Gibeonites and Nethinim" has to say:

Although the Gibeonites deserved no better fate than all the rest of the Canaanite nations, in that the covenant made with them was obtained through subterfuge, Joshua nevertheless kept his promise to them, in order to show the world the sanctity of an oath to Israel (Git. 46a). He hesitated to defend them when they were attacked, but God reminded him, "if you estrange those who are distant you will ultimately estrange also those who are near" (Num. R. 8:4). In the course of time it became obvious that the Gibeonites were not worthy of being received into the Jewish fold and Joshua, therefore, left their fate to be decided by the one who was to build the Temple (TJ, Sanh. 6:9, 23c–d).

During David's reign Israel suffered from a drought which was ascertained to be God's punishment for the murder of seven Gibeonites by the descendants of Saul. When David sought to make restitution through ransom, the Gibeonites firmly refused, insisting upon lives from the household of Saul. This cold-bloodedness clearly demonstrated to David the absence in the Gibeonite character of Israel's three basic attributes—mercy, humility, and benevolence—and he consequently excluded them from the assembly of Israel (TJ, Kid. 4:1, 65c). Ezra renewed the edict, which is to be in force even in the Messianic era (ibid.).

The commentator Rashi (eleventh century), who frequently consults rabbinic literature, cites much of the above information to explain the Gibeonites' exclusion from the people of Israel in II Samuel 21:2. Yet, he states the following about v 10:

In the rainy season of Tishrei; for they were not given over for burial. But it is not written: “You shall not allow his body to remain overnight” (Deut. 21:22)? However they said: It is preferable that one letter of the Torah be uprooted so that the Divine Name be publicly hallowed for when passersby would inquire: Who are these? They would say to them: They are princes. And what did they do? They stretched out their hands against those who attached themselves but were [proselytes] not accepted. They would then say: There is no nation that one ought to join like this one.

The rabbis and Rashi think that the Gibeonites were cruel and merciless when they executed the family of Saul, so David excluded them from Israel. Yet, Rashi says that God in II Samuel 21 suspended a law of the Torah that required the removal of hanging corpses on the day of the execution. For Rashi, God did so to make a good impression on other nations, to show that God values the lives even of proselytes who weren't accepted into Israel. God suspends a law that treats the guilty with dignity, yet he does so to demonstrate his compassion. Overall, that's what II Samuel 21 is: God's strict justice mixed with his compassion, even for the executed party. When does God finally send rain to end the famine? After Rizpah (the mother of two of Saul's sons) protected the bodies of Saul's executed sons and grandsons, prompting David to dignify their bones through burial (v 14).

The rabbinic comments on Gibeon's exclusion from Israel catches my attention, for inclusion/exclusion from the community of Israel is an interest of mine (see Deuteronomy 23 for examples of this issue). I wonder what it means for Gibeon to be excluded. That they can't live in the land of Israel? That they can live there, but not as Israelites, meaning they lack Israelite privileges and can't marry Israelites? They obviously weren't barred from the land, for Nehemiah 3:7 presents a Gibeonite helping with repairs. Throughout Ezra and Nehemiah (Ezra 2, Nehemiah 7, etc.), we see the nethinim, whom the rabbis identify as descendants of the Gibeonites, the ones who did the grunt work for God's sanctuary (Joshua 9:21, 23, 27). Even under Ezra, whom the rabbis say excluded the Gibeonites from the assembly of Israel, the Gibeonites were still in the land of Israel, performing their office. The EJ article may explain what the exclusion means, namely, that they couldn't marry Israelites: They were regarded as the descendants of the Gibeonites (Yev. 78b–79a) and the prohibition in their marrying Jews of pure pedigree as having been established by King David (ibid. 78b) and reconfirmed by Ezra (Num. R. 8:4).

I Watched Gandhi Last Night

I watched Gandhi last night in celebration of his birthday! This won’t be a thorough write-up, but I just want to make three points:

1. You know the reporter who said that the moral authority of the British empire had collapsed, or something to that effect? That was Martin Sheen! When I first watched the movie, that didn’t mean much to me, since that was before the West Wing, plus I hadn’t yet seen the movies in which Martin Sheen stood out to me (Dead Zone, O, Firestarter, the one with Jimmy Smits about voodoo).

2. I’ve been watching Cheers lately, so I was surprised to see John Ratzenberger (Cliff Clavin) riding next to Candace Bergen on Gandhi. His voice didn’t even sound like Cliff’s! It was like Cliff speaking with Martin Sheen’s voice!

3. Gandhi said that turning the other cheek will make your enemies respect you. Is that true? Will letting yourself get beaten up make your enemies respect you? That’s not what’s conveyed on TV shows! I was thinking about this because I watched a Dr. Phil program about bullying. Dr. Phil told the victim that she should use her karate skills on them, since she was a brown belt. Or, more accurately, he said she shouldn’t do that, but he’d like to enjoy the fantasy. Many like to see the wicked get their just due. Gandhi tried to see beyond that, though, for, when Indians were killing Brits, Gandhi was concerned about the Brits’ families. But I’m not sure if his peaceful approach would have worked with Hitler.

10 Random Beliefs Meme

Bitsi tagged me in her post, 10 random beliefs meme, to write my own ten random beliefs. Here they are, the good, the bad, and the ugly:

1. Me being part of an evangelical community would be like being in a straitjacket!

2. Libertarianism would probably work for health care because it would result in competition and lower prices. But it won’t happen, so the government paying for my health care looks pretty good to me!

3. Libertarianism and conservatism are wrong to expect everybody to be a successful entrepreneur or sink, for not everyone has business talent.

4. People are good at heart; people are self-absorbed jerks with no understanding towards other people. Contradictory, I know!

5. There are a lot of liberals who are condescending, and there are a lot of evangelicals who are smug. But I should try to see them as people.

6. Life begins at conception.

7. There’s a loving higher power with a moral standard of love. He’s been at work throughout history, and he’s at work today in people’s lives, teaching them, providing for them, and making them better people. We see this in the Bible, but I wouldn’t rule out it also being in non-Christian settings, cultures, and religions, in some way, shape, or form.

8. There’s an afterlife.

9. God will one day dramatically intervene in human events, defeat evil, and set up his kingdom.

10. I should be compassionate towards and help the poor, because I could be poor.

Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, Gandhi

1. Robert M. Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought: The Jewish Experience in History (New York: MacMillan, 1980) 114.

The Zoroastrian tradition, beginning to take shape in the Achaemenid period of Persian history, would exist in close proximity to Jews for many centuries.

The Achaemenid Empire lasted from 550-330 B.C.E., which includes the time that the Persians controlled Israel. According to Alan Segal, Zoroastrianism became the state religion of the Sassanian Empire in 225 C.E. at the earliest (Two Powers in Heaven, p. 19). But perhaps Seltzer is still correct to say that the Jews had exposure to the Zoroastrian traditions during the sixth-fifth centuries B.C.E..

I know wikipedia is not the best source, but I like its article on Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism is about good triumphing over evil under a messianic sort of figure, a perfect world replacing our current imperfect one, and the resurrection of the dead. At the same time, its apocalyptic, eschatological mindset didn't lead it to devalue this world, for it maintained that good thoughts, good words, and good deeds in the here-and-now create happiness and hold chaos at bay.

Judaism has many of the same ideas. Did any of them come from Zoroastrianism? Resurrection at the last day wasn't really a prominent idea before the exile, for many Israelites believed the dead went to Sheol. After the exile, when the Jews came into contact with Persia, it became increasingly emphasized. While there was a belief before the exile that the Davidic line would be restored and a time of peace would ensue, I'm not sure if pre-exilic Israelite thought believed in the Messiah who would come and fix everything. Good deeds holding chaos at bay? That's an idea that seemed to pervade the ancient Near East, which believed in holding the forces of chaos at bay. Maybe Judaism got some ideas from Zoroastrianism. Some of them it could have gotten from elsewhere. Or some conservatives may argue that God gave Israel these ideas, which overlapped with those of other cultures, who themselves may have received them from God at some point. I don't know.

2. Eugene Mihaly, A Song to Creation: A Dialogue with a Text (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1975) 41-45.

I enjoyed Mihaly's description of Gnosticism, which (according to him) had the following tenets: this world is evil because it was created by a wicked Demiurge, but the top benevolent God offers us hope that our souls will be united with him after death. There's no point trying to make this world a better place, for it is hopelessly corrupt. In the meantime, we should avoid fleshly desires or (for other Gnostics) overindulge in them to thumb our noses at the world's morality. We should learn the path to salvation (the soul's escape from the body at death) and use magic to keep demonic forces at bay.

Part of me can sympathize with Gnosticism. Is the world good or evil? I can see both. There are many things to enjoy, but there's also a lot of bad stuff that leads people to question if a benevolent God is truly running the show: starvation, disease, poverty, wars, etc. And there are some things that (at first sight) don't seem to be the product of a wise, benevolent God. Why is so much of the world covered with salt-water, for example? So I can somewhat understand a perspective that says, "Look, the world is a bad place, and you may or may not survive it, but remember that the top God loves you, and you'll be with him after death if you pursue the path of salvation." What's one solution to the problem of evil in the world? Say that this world doesn't matter, since there's an afterlife anyway! "Why expect this world to be fair?," the Gnostics ask. "The Demiurge runs it, so it often is not fair!"

Many Gnostics may have been ascetic because matter could trap people to follow the Demiurge rather than pursuing the top God of love. Food, drink, and sex can easily trap people, lead to a lack of personal fulfillment, and have other negative effects (e.g., children out of wedlock). It's like the Matrix: that one guy preferred the illusory joys of food to the "real world," so he picked captivity to the Smiths over freedom. That may be how the Gnostics viewed material pleasures.

I wonder if there was any benevolence in Gnostic ethics, or if it was mostly about asceticism, entering a good afterlife, and warding off demons in the here-and-now. If this world doesn't matter, then why help the poor? Was there any concept in Gnosticism of developing a benevolent character in preparation for meeting the divine?

In a sense, Christianity has some Gnostic ideas, or, rather, ideas that overlap with Gnosticism. Paul never says that Satan created the cosmos, for he assumes that the one true God did that. But he does call Satan the "god of this world" (II Corinthians 4:4). Paul believes in resurrection, but he also expresses eagerness at leaving his earthly body and being with the Lord (II Corinthians 5). No wonder there were Gnostics who felt comfortable using Paul! But kindness was definitely a part of Paul's ethics.

3. Today is the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi. Perhaps I should watch the movie about his life, but I'm not really in the mood to right now. One thing I like about the movie was when the British were complaining that British schoolchildren were writing papers about Gandhi the hero! I also appreciated the part where the British were demonstrating their barbarity against the Indians, and a reporter called someone, saying something like, "The moral authority of the British empire has fallen!"

On second thought, maybe I will watch the movie tonight...

Category or Spiritual Path?

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God (Cambridge: Carroll and Graf, 2007) 390.

Once you buy the evangelical born-again "Jesus saves" mantra, the idea that salvation is a journey goes out the window. You're living in the realm of a magical formula. It seems to me that the [Greek] Orthodox idea of a slow journey to God, wherein no one is instantly "saved" or "lost" and nothing is completely resolved in this life (and perhaps in the next), mirrors the reality of how life works, at least as I've experienced it.

This quote, among other things, came back to me last night after I had done my daily reading of Ellen G. White (one of the founders of Seventh-Day Adventism). I've been reading White's Christ Object Lessons, her book about parables, and the chapter I read yesterday was 19. The Measure of Forgiveness. It's about the man in Matthew 18:21-25 whom the the king forgave of a massive debt, yet this same man did not forgive someone who owed him a smaller amount of money. The unforgiving man is then cast into a debtors' prison, where he is tormented until he pays every last penny of his debt.

At the end of the chapter, Ellen White states: "We are not forgiven because we forgive, but as we forgive. The ground of all forgiveness is found in the unmerited love of God, but by our attitude toward others we show whether we have made that love our own."

I thought about this. I could see Ellen White's point. If I have problems forgiving others, then I may not be internalizing God's forgiveness of me. If God let me off for my sins, after all, then why shouldn't I forgive someone else who's acted badly? What makes me better than the person I'm not forgiving?

But suppose I don't forgive. Does that mean I wasn't saved in the first place, or that I lost my salvation through not forgiving? Is the family of God a revolving door, in which I can go inside and out based on my attitude? The Epistle of Hebrews presents losing one's salvation as a pretty dramatic thing, not as something that occurs through human weakness! Moreover, if I wasn't saved in the first place because of my struggles with resentment, does that mean my entire Christian experience after I said the sinner's prayer was a sham? That the past fifteen-or-so years do not matter, and I need to say the sinner's prayer again, this time with more conviction (even though I did it with conviction the first time around)?

I then thought about a class that I took at Harvard Divinity School. It was with Arthur Dyck, and it was comparing the sermons of Joseph Butler with those of Jonathan Edwards, both of whom were Christian thinkers in the eighteenth century. Many of us know of Jonathan Edwards, particularly his hell-fire-and-brimstone sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." For Dr. Dyck's class, we were reading his Charity and Its Fruits, which was a collection of Edwards' sermons about I Corinthians 13, the love chapter. Like many of the Puritans, Edwards was interested in the question of how he could be sure he was part of the elect, the saved family of God. For him, he knew he was part of the elect if he was bearing Christian fruit, such as love for God and neighbor.

Butler, however, was different. "Saved" and "lost" were not really categories of interest to him. His preoccupation was more with whether a person is closer to or farther away from God. For Butler, we try to move towards God and become moral people by subjecting ourselves to positive influences: prayer, Bible reading, the worship of God in church, etc. And it's important for us to have what Dr. Dyck called "cool hours," periods in which we reflect on our lives. If David had done that, Butler asserted, then he wouldn't have gotten on the path of sleeping with Bathsheba and killing Uriah. David obviously wasn't taking moral stock of his life at that time!

I think that Paul resembles Edwards, whereas the synoptic Gospels are more like Butler. Paul treats salvation as something we enter. You're either saved or you're lost, a child of God or a child of the world, alive to sin or dead to sin, a member of the body of Christ or an outsider, a believer or an unbeliever, part of the kingdom of light or the kingdom of darkness. For Paul, you enter the family of God at a specific event, when you believe or are baptized. John is like this as well.

In the synoptic Gospels (except for passages in Acts, and perhaps elsewhere), it's more like this: God has a way that we should follow, which includes loving God and neighbor and trusting God. We should repent and try to live that way. When we screw up, we should come to God and receive forgiveness, something we need to do on a daily basis. But we should make sure that we're internalizing God's forgiveness of us by forgiving others. Otherwise, God's forgiveness of us will be revoked. It's not a matter of saying the sinner's prayer the right way or of dramatically exiting the family of God or of not being saved in the first place, but rather of following a path that includes love, God's forgiveness of us (presumably on account of Christ's blood), and our forgiveness of others.

My mind also goes back to a presentation that I gave at the Adventist Forum in New York. I was talking about my struggles with the "How do I know I am saved?" issue. I've discussed the topic here: Christians say I know I'm truly saved if I bear spiritual fruit (e.g., love, joy, peace, etc.), I look at my life and see deficiencies, so I despair. A lady asked me in the question-and-answer session, "Instead of focusing on whether or not you'll be in the good afterlife and escape hell, why not look instead at the issue of whether you're close to God or not?" That is a good point. Rather than obsessing over what category I'm in ("saved" or "lost"), why not look at how close I am to God? Do I truly receive God's love? Do I see others with love, as God sees me? Do I view myself as a sinner who needs God's continual mercy and forgiveness, and extend mercy to those who sin against me? In what ways can I walk God's path better?

C.S. Lewis probably believed that one becomes a Christian at a certain point (a moment of decision, or baptism, or whatever), for he says that the children of God will become like God. But there's a point in Mere Christianity where he sees the categories of "saved" and "lost," "Christian" and "non-Christian" as not particularly helpful, preferring instead to focus on closeness to God. In the chapter, "Nice People or New Men," he states the following:

They may demand not merely that each man's life should improve if he becomes a Christian: they may also demand before they believe in Christianity that they should see the whole world neatly divided into two camps -Christian and non-Christian-and that all the people in the first camp at any given moment should be obviously nicer than all the people in the second. This is unreasonable...[T]he situation in the actual world is much more complicated than that. The world does not consist of 100 per cent Christians and 100 per cent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so. There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. There are people in other religions who are being led by God's secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it. For example, a Buddhist of good will may be led to concentrate more and more on the Buddhist teaching about mercy and to leave in the background (though he might still say he believed) the Buddhist teaching on certain other points. Many of the good Pagans long before Christ's birth may have been in this position. And always, of course, there are a great many people who are just confused in mind and have a lot of inconsistent beliefs all jumbled up together. Consequently, it is not much use trying to make judgments about Christians and non-Christians in the mass. It is some use comparing cats and dogs, or even men and women, in the mass, because there one knows definitely which is which. Also, an animal does not turn (either slowly or suddenly) from a dog into a cat. But when we are comparing Christians in general with non-Christians in general, we are usually not thinking about real people whom we know at all, but only about two vague ideas which we have got from novels and newspapers. If you want to compare the bad Christian and the good Atheist, you must think about two real specimens whom you have actually met. Unless we come down to brass tacks in that way, we shall only be wasting time.

Stealing from God, Son of Man, "Spirit-Led"

1. Jacob Neusner, Invitation to Midrash: The Workings of Rabbinic Bible Interpretation (Atlanta: Scholars, 1998) 260.

Said R. Hinnena b. Pappa, "Whoever derives benefit from this world without reciting a blessing is as if he steals from the Holy One, blessed be he, and the community of Israel."

This is from Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 10:2 (ca. 600 C.E.). I remember Jon Levenson quoting it: if you eat without saying a blessing, then you're a thief! I've read, though, that Jewish halakah qualifies this somewhat: if you're doing something like, say, eating an apple for a snack, you don't have to say a blessing. But I forget the exact source.

In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, the wealthy entrepreneur Hank Rearden is reluctant to pray with his family to thank God for the food. A student presenting that chapter for my Atlas Shrugged class said Rearden was reluctant to pray because he was the one who provided the food for his family through his hard work, so why should he thank God?

But it's God who gives human beings the power to make wealth (Deuteronomy 8:17-18), and God created the bountiful food for us to enjoy. So I feel I should thank God for my food, since it's his to begin with.

2. Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports About Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1977) 261.

It is now possible to construct a coherent, synchronized history of the [two powers in heaven] tradition...The book of Daniel, usually dated to Maccabean times, is the earliest witness in the Bible to the existence of apocalyptic traditions of a heavenly figure, though it is possible that some Enoch traditions are earlier...The events narrated in Dan. 7:9f. may be part of the Israelite Holy War and Divine Warrior traditions--mythological motifs which Israel shared with its neighbors.

In Daniel 7, a Son of Man comes to the Ancient of Days (God) and receives the kingdom and dominion. Many scholars believe that the Son of Man represents the holy people of Israel, since Daniel 7:18, 22 talk about the holy ones possessing the kingdom, as the Son of Man does. He's depicted as a man to contrast God's kingdom with those of the ferocious beasts in the chapter, the oppressors of Israel. In the Anchor Bible Dictionary article on the "Son of Man," George W.E. Nicklesburg offers the possibility that the Son of Man was a heavenly figure who was a patron of the saints of Israel. Regarding the parallels between Daniel 7 and the myths of Israel's neighbors, I remember reading an article in which one of my professors compared the Son of Man with Baal, and the Ancient of Days as El. White hair was a common feature among these myths.

It's easy to get the impression from Daniel 7 that there is a God and another heavenly figure, meaning there are two powers in heaven. Whether that's the original meaning of Daniel 7 is unclear, but it may have become understood to convey that.

There are many theological issues here: Jesus' identification with his church, a seemingly unfulfilled expectation that God would beat Antiochus Epiphanes and immediately proceed to rule the world, the existence of another figure in heaven besides the Most High God and the question of whether or not that detracts from God's glory and uniqueness, whether Israel can convey truth by borrowing from foreign mythology, etc.

3. Eugene Mihaly, A Song to Creation: A Dialogue with a Text (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1975) 30.

The profundity of Scripture is never exhausted. Whatever a dedicated, inspired student derives from a biblical verse is present in the text--indeed, every conceivable insight was anticipated at Sinai, the sum of human possibility. The same holy spirit which permeates the Torah is potentially present in us and, if we are worthy, it will aid us in uncovering the truth imbedded in the words of Scripture.

Some Christians rely on scholarship and word studies to understand Scripture. Others claim they don't need that stuff because they have the personal guidance of the Holy Spirit. Many rely on both scholarship and the Holy Spirit to determine truths about God and life in the Bible.

I've often wrestled with the view that the Holy Spirit guides us as to the meaning of Scripture. A big reason is that "Spirit-led people" arrive at different conclusions about certain passages' meanings. There are pre-tribbers, post-tribbers, pre-millennialists, amillennialists, and a host of other people who claim to be led by the Holy Spirit. So do Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, for that matter. To their credit, they tell me to pray to God for guidance about the right religion. They leave the ball in God's court, and they sincerely expect God to guide me to their religion!

But, if God is real, wouldn't he want to guide his children on a personal level?

Perhaps people arrive at different "Spirit-led" conclusions because of the Bible's profundity: it has a lot of meanings! But, for certain issues, there comes a point at which only one point of view can be correct: either the saints will be raptured before the tribulation, or in the middle of it, or thereafter. All three can't be simultaneously true, right?

But can God lead people to different doctrinal beliefs based on where they are? A tender person may need the doctrine of "Once Saved Always Saved," along with the assurance of God's love that it provides. But those who simply "believe" and live godless lives without even blinking may need the message that they can lose their salvation. The only problem in this scenario is that God seems to be telling a white lie to one of the groups!