THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT IN A FALLEN WORLD

You seem to want to make a good many assumptions about my theological beliefs that are simply not true:

First, you cast me as a straw man for some supposedly opposing ideological camp that apparently denies your 18th Century invention of “God given rights”. One can only presume, this opposition derives their objection from their Utilitarian contention that these Self evidently emoted, supposedly divinely ordained rights either don’t exist or that such individual rights must be sacrificed at the alter of what your opposition worships as the greater good.

Let me say as clearly as I can, I don’t have any investment in either side of this debate. I honestly don’t believe that asserting the greater good and still believing in individual autonomy are mutually exclusive positions – depending on the issue, the Left and the Right often change sides. I don’t see this presumed either/or dualism as helpful or enlightening for most issues. My legal experience tells me that, other than obvious issues, most dilemmas require some balance between rights and responsibilities. However, it seems to be your only argument for everything political.

I’ve told you over and over again, I don’t know if God grants rights. There is nothing in Scripture that DIRECTLY makes this assertion. There wasn’t even a word for “rights” as we define it now known to exist in any languages (including biblical languages) before the Middle Ages. Paul would have found the issue completely foreign to his theology. He thought that the slave and the slaver could be redeemed as a matter of how they voluntarily loved, not their political powers, or lack thereof.

Even though I don’t know if such God given rights exist or not, I definitely believe that God given responsibilities exist. And whether these unicorn rights exist or not, I just don’t find the question of such rights helpful to my or anyone else’s actual salvation, whereas I do believe that the acceptance of our God given responsibilities appears to be critical.

Why is “I don’t know” not good enough for you on this issue? Is it because this question has more to do with political manipulation than divine inspiration? Politics is why Locke conjured such rights it and why Jefferson plagiarized them, wasn’t it?

Second, you appear to presume that I don’t believe in one narrow understanding of the many levels of meaning that can be found in our biblical version of a creation myth, a story that shares its universal God given truth with numerous very similar versions from remote cultures and times, some of which preceded the writing of the Bible. In general terms, what you have said about Genesis is one level of looking at it. I don’t really disagree so much as I think this mystery has many possible theoretical meanings, none of which probably comprehend the entire truth of our estrangement and atonement with God. My response is more like, “yes, and . . . “ rather than, “no, but . . . .”

Finally, you seem to think that I am incapable of salvation unless it is reveal to me in the same way that it is reveal to you. The Gospels would not have been read by most Christians for centuries after Jesus lived, and yet those people, slave and slave owners, rabbinical Jews and scripturally ignorant Gentiles, could not be saved just by hearing of the story of Jesus and taking a leap of faith God offers us?

For someone who constantly tells me that he distrusts experts, you seem to present a very Pharisaic and elite attitude about Scripture. You accuse me of not reading the Bible (not true), but instead reading what other people say about the Bible. And yet, you are not reading the Bible. You are reading translations, maybe many translations, written by others. As you read those translations, don’t you derive the meaning of a given passage by reading the interpretations that true biblical scholars give to that passage and to its context within a given theological construct.

The fact is that to be an actual biblical scholar, one has to read what a good many other theologians (readers of ancient scriptural languages) have written about the Bible. For example how many very different Greek words are there in ancient scripture copies for the single word “love” we find in English translations? Why is one kind of Greek “love“used sometimes and another word another time, and how does that fit into the general message on love that Paul, for example, was trying to convey? I cannot think of a more important word than “love” to Christian belief, and yet, depending on who translated it and what theologian with what theological axe to grind interprets that passage, we can miss the meaning entirely.

And these actual theologians have been arguing over the meaning of scriptural interpretations, both large and small, literally since right after Jesus resurrected. Even the Apostles argued over who could be saved and how. Wars were fought, people were tortured to death, rulers deposed, and Jesus was crucified, over what – legalistic biblical interpretations.

There doesn’t seem to be much hope for this, but maybe in the case of claims of knowing what God wants, we should do what Jesus said: stop our Pharisaic focusing on the letter of the law and give our open hearts over to the spirit of the law. I have a theory about this. We seem to be at our worst at living the spirit, the sacrifice, the deepest meaning what Jesus lived when, instead of this loving spirit becoming our political interactions with our brothers and sisters, our preferred pride of politics becomes our religion.

That is a lot. It would probably be best to break this down into more bite size issues if you want. What exactly is it that you claim to believe about your theology of redemption from a finite and fallen world through atonement that you think I am ignorant of? If you want to focus on Genesis 3, then I have lots of questions for you:

Have you considered that an infinite God must have known that Adam and Eve would succumb to temptation for an eternity before he created us? Do you think God is confined by time and is constantly surprised by Her creation? If God proclaimed His creation “good” weren’t humans “good” too? Why would God get mad about something she had to create us specifically to do? Why would God get mad period? Considering that God is the uncaused cause, the unmoved mover, why is our Biblical God often so godawful fickle? What is the symbolic meaning the tree of knowledge of good and evil? The tree of life? What is the meaning of all the obvious sexual symbolism in the story? Don’t you think that the ancient herders who first wrote and read the Bible would have gotten all the sexual references? Why a snake? Why is it tempting Eve, but not Adam? Why a garden? How did natural sexual attraction and sexual shame become a duality? Does any other animal in paradise or out suffer this duality? How does this comport with their sudden sexual recognition of their nudity? Why the significance of Eve being sentenced to suffer in child birth? How is procreation and death, resurrection and descent,, Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil, all necessary in God’s plan? Is death the punishment or was our self imposed willful separation from God the real death, the real punishment? Was disobeying a divinely mandated dietary law really the sin, or was it the human prideful and selfish exercise of God given free the sin where we separated ourselves from God rather than the other way around? And if so, does this Fall preordain our eventual rising by our freely choosing God’s love? Is this choice toward our atonement (literally our “at one ment”) and eternal life our simply our choice to return to God? Has God as Christ (the “Alpha and the Omega”) for all of existence in all the universe been with us, a part and a brother in all material suffering, and therefore was Christ as Jesus an apex teachable moment of something that is actually eternal? How is sacrificial suffering for others eternally redemptive? Have you considered that the knowledge that we have that differs from our animal ancestors is our sentience, our existential dread of our own mortality? Was this existential dread that defines us as human symbolized by the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge? How is the universal Christ eternal in matter, just as He became matter in Jesus, always dying and resurrecting, entropy and recreation, destruction and creation, the yen and the yang, in everything that is matter and energy? Is that what makes this universe finite and fallen? In Eden, other than the forbidden fruit, weren’t all natural choices morally neutral, just like the natural inclination of a tiger to kill and eat a gazelle is neither good nor bad? Is a characteristic being human, of defining finite and fallen, that many of our choices are no longer morally neutral? That a choice can be made out of love or selfishness? Is it the nature of being fully human (as God lovingly created us) to have that “knowledge of good and evil” defined by those choices that makes for us the world as finite and fallen? Would we really be human without that metaphorically forbidden knowledge? Was the first act of being human the choice God granted us to be born and to die?

One could spend one‘s whole life studying Genesis, looking at all the layers of meaning and truth in that wonderful set of storirs, and still not scratch the surface of the psychological and metaphysical depths that God imparted with it. To say that there is one correct and perfect understanding of it just leaves me laughing at the pride that such an assertion reveals. I’m happy to discuss anything that you want about it and I will look forward to learning something, but nothing you’ve said so far surprises or enlightens. I’ve heard it all before. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disagreeing with your view. My attitude instead is “yes, and, and, and, and ….“