If you are at all familiar with the Old Testament, I want you to think a moment about the various tribes of people encountered by the Ancient Hebrews. This is my question…when you think about these other tribes do you think they have the wrong God or the wrong way of worshiping God? This is what you, living in the 21st Century, think - not what they or the Ancient Hebrews thought, nor what the writers of the Old Testament thought.
Mad Priest posted the following at OCICBW regarding the Jews and YHWH. I started seeing these comments from liberal minded folks who leapt right into criticism of how God “WAS” back then. I realized that otherwise sensible, progressive minded folk were taking a rather literal view of things. How do we get from understanding that much of Genesis is better understood as mythology than as history to judging God by how YHWH is presented in later Old Testament stories? --stories composed and eventually written down and then revised by divinely inspired men trying to understand their relationship to YHWH and express that relationship with the limitation of human words.
It was while thinking about this that I formulated my question. I believe we have been encouraged to think that they had the wrong God. For example, remember the “Golden Calf” from The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston? Most of us would describe that scene, and the portion of the story it represents, as follows: Moses is gone up on the mountain for a long time and the wandering Hebrews begin to get twitchy, eventually losing control, gathering up their gold and forging a sacred cow to worship in place of YHWH (I.e., the wrong God). This cow god allows for them to act like they’re at a frat party - at least in the movie. In the end, there’s Hell to pay…
However, I believe that those confused Hebrews as well as the other tribes were not following the wrong God but, rather, were wrong in their style of worship.
I am working my way through a Great Courses series on the “Old Testament,” taught by Professor A.J. Levine. She explains that all the other religions of the time saw their Gods as being very much connected to place. They believed strongly in monoliths that marked sacred mountains or locations where their Gods resided. The Ancient Hebrews, however, believed that YHWH was always everywhere with them.
Professor Levine suggests that what really occurs while Moses is up the mountain is that the people begin to get anxious and question this new way of thinking about the presence of God. In creating the Golden Calf they are not making up some new deity so they can have a big drunken orgy and to hell with Moses and YHWY. Rather they are reverting to an older way of worship - they lose faith in what they have been doing and create an idol in which their God can be satisfied and come down and live with them in a physical place like the other tribes’ Gods.
Once I heard it expressed this way, the entire Golden Calf episode made much more sense to me. Further, I believe the issue is wrong worship, not wrong God. After all, every Sunday we recite, "We believe in one God..."
And with that thought, I reintroduce my blog. I have hinted over the past few months that I want to use my blog as a tool to mark my spiritual journey. To that end I have been reading and gathering up future reading (fancy way of saying “bought more unread books”). I am inspired by cyber friends who blog with a spiritual focus. I also have a desire to flesh out this secular monasticm - this hermit lifestyle - I value so much. Part of my future studies will include a better understanding of The Rule of St. Benedict in the hope of writing my own “Rule” for my Hermitage.
Brother John up in British Columbia is a brother with the Community of St. Aidan of Lindisfarne and his new home in a more rural section of Vancouver Island has been named St. Cuthbert’s Cottage by his Order. Perhaps some day I will christen my log home with a similar new name.
I purchased The Rule of Benedict: A Spirituality for the 21st Century by Joan Chittister as a promising introduction to the Rule.
Late in the Summer I read Mary Called Magdalene by Margaret George. I had picked up this copy from the $2 rack at my local bookstore. They wheel out this old style library cart in front of the shop every day and it holds what can be called “less than remaindered homeless” books. Yet two of the more interesting books I’ve read recently came off that rack, and now too my cyber sistah Maria has picked up a copy of God Among The Shakers upon my recommendation (it speaks to our mutual secular monasticm).
Margaret George’s book, more than anything, forced me to think about how all the main characters from the Gospels were Jews. We get so caught up in our Christianity sometimes that we minimize or forget about Jesus’ Jewish faith. We have blamed the Jews for crucifying Christ - as if he was this Christian outsider.
There was significant overlap between Judaism and the early church - for many years Christianity was looked about as a sect of Judaism. All this ruminating over our deep connection guided my reading. I finally dusted off my copy of The Source by Michener, as well as cracked open a few other titles that have been patiently waiting on my shelves for a number of years now: The Gift of the Jews by Thomas Cahill, The First Crusade, and The Oxford History of Byzantium in particular.
Mad Priest posted the following at OCICBW regarding the Jews and YHWH. I started seeing these comments from liberal minded folks who leapt right into criticism of how God “WAS” back then. I realized that otherwise sensible, progressive minded folk were taking a rather literal view of things. How do we get from understanding that much of Genesis is better understood as mythology than as history to judging God by how YHWH is presented in later Old Testament stories? --stories composed and eventually written down and then revised by divinely inspired men trying to understand their relationship to YHWH and express that relationship with the limitation of human words.
It was while thinking about this that I formulated my question. I believe we have been encouraged to think that they had the wrong God. For example, remember the “Golden Calf” from The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston? Most of us would describe that scene, and the portion of the story it represents, as follows: Moses is gone up on the mountain for a long time and the wandering Hebrews begin to get twitchy, eventually losing control, gathering up their gold and forging a sacred cow to worship in place of YHWH (I.e., the wrong God). This cow god allows for them to act like they’re at a frat party - at least in the movie. In the end, there’s Hell to pay…
However, I believe that those confused Hebrews as well as the other tribes were not following the wrong God but, rather, were wrong in their style of worship.
I am working my way through a Great Courses series on the “Old Testament,” taught by Professor A.J. Levine. She explains that all the other religions of the time saw their Gods as being very much connected to place. They believed strongly in monoliths that marked sacred mountains or locations where their Gods resided. The Ancient Hebrews, however, believed that YHWH was always everywhere with them.
Professor Levine suggests that what really occurs while Moses is up the mountain is that the people begin to get anxious and question this new way of thinking about the presence of God. In creating the Golden Calf they are not making up some new deity so they can have a big drunken orgy and to hell with Moses and YHWY. Rather they are reverting to an older way of worship - they lose faith in what they have been doing and create an idol in which their God can be satisfied and come down and live with them in a physical place like the other tribes’ Gods.
Once I heard it expressed this way, the entire Golden Calf episode made much more sense to me. Further, I believe the issue is wrong worship, not wrong God. After all, every Sunday we recite, "We believe in one God..."
And with that thought, I reintroduce my blog. I have hinted over the past few months that I want to use my blog as a tool to mark my spiritual journey. To that end I have been reading and gathering up future reading (fancy way of saying “bought more unread books”). I am inspired by cyber friends who blog with a spiritual focus. I also have a desire to flesh out this secular monasticm - this hermit lifestyle - I value so much. Part of my future studies will include a better understanding of The Rule of St. Benedict in the hope of writing my own “Rule” for my Hermitage.
Brother John up in British Columbia is a brother with the Community of St. Aidan of Lindisfarne and his new home in a more rural section of Vancouver Island has been named St. Cuthbert’s Cottage by his Order. Perhaps some day I will christen my log home with a similar new name.
I purchased The Rule of Benedict: A Spirituality for the 21st Century by Joan Chittister as a promising introduction to the Rule.
Late in the Summer I read Mary Called Magdalene by Margaret George. I had picked up this copy from the $2 rack at my local bookstore. They wheel out this old style library cart in front of the shop every day and it holds what can be called “less than remaindered homeless” books. Yet two of the more interesting books I’ve read recently came off that rack, and now too my cyber sistah Maria has picked up a copy of God Among The Shakers upon my recommendation (it speaks to our mutual secular monasticm).
Margaret George’s book, more than anything, forced me to think about how all the main characters from the Gospels were Jews. We get so caught up in our Christianity sometimes that we minimize or forget about Jesus’ Jewish faith. We have blamed the Jews for crucifying Christ - as if he was this Christian outsider.
There was significant overlap between Judaism and the early church - for many years Christianity was looked about as a sect of Judaism. All this ruminating over our deep connection guided my reading. I finally dusted off my copy of The Source by Michener, as well as cracked open a few other titles that have been patiently waiting on my shelves for a number of years now: The Gift of the Jews by Thomas Cahill, The First Crusade, and The Oxford History of Byzantium in particular.
Well, I suppose this is long enough, and it has sat on my computer waiting for me to find some wireless zone to actually post. I look forward to reading your comments. Peace.
UPDATE: It's so much harder to edit on the fly. My apologies to Brother John, but now the post reflects the correct info.
UPDATE: It's so much harder to edit on the fly. My apologies to Brother John, but now the post reflects the correct info.
6 comments:
I thought that was you at the top of the post for a second.
Welcome back to Blogland, Renz.
Jesus was born a Jew, and he died a Jew. Some folks seem to forget. It seems to me that Jesus did not intend to start a new religion.
There's a kind of layering happening when we say God "was", isn't there. We don't really believe that God WAS something then that he isn't now, but we're arguing from the text as basis. In this narrative, according to the thinking of those people, God was...because we believe that the Canon means something, that there is something to be discovered from the story of a changing idea of God.
There are also those who believe that God changes and the narrative goes something like: He was suddenly faced with unexpected evil (the Fall), he tried this and that to improve matters, he failed, he learned, in the end he had to send Jesus.... that's just as strange and anthropomorphic an interpretation.
I agree, I had hoped we'd have long left the "Jews vs Christians" debate behind and I'm often surprised how it still comes up in various disguises.
Is it the idea that we believe our faith to be better, somehow more complete, because we see the Messiah in Jesus?
I'd like to think it's because of our generally appalling knowledge of the Old Testament. There's very little difference in the Jewish idea of God to the Christian one but we seem to be fixed on this idea of a primitive, blood thirsty Old Testament and a Sweet Jesus Meek and Mild New Testament.
Good to have you back!!!
As I work through Karen Armstrong's A Defence of God or something like that...I am learning about the struggle to understand the trinity. I had a post that was mostly missed I think where I tried to explain in my own words...see below.
The general struggle had to do with God who is all being vs. how God interacts with humanity.
The Exodus reading from last Sunday had to do with God interacting with the Ancient Hebrews.
The Incarnation of Christ is our understanding of God interacting with us.
Even the other tribal religions were struggling with these concepts.
You're right, Mimi, Jesus was working on monotheism 2.0 which was rebranded as "Christianity 1.0" Yet Muhamed comes along and similarly begins working on monotheism 3.0 and ends up with Islam 1.0.
At heart we are all trying to understand the great divinity and how that divinity connects with our physical reality.
I love Karen Armstrong. Did you ever read her autobiography Through The Narrow Gate? She describes her journey to being a nun and then back out of that life.
I hugely admire her but throughout there is a kind of lack of a genuine spirituality. She's very intellectual and she has fleeting encounters with transcendence but I did surprise me that she had very little if any emotional connection with God throughout her religious life.
I think that's the real difficulty. Yes, at heart we are all trying to understand the great divinity and how it connects with our physical reality. But some of us try to "understand" it too cerebrally, while others genuinely try to understand it "at heart".
And the deeper you get, the less you need intellectual understanding. It just IS. And it makes and odd kind of sense.
It's not about one being superior to the other. I'm beginning to believe that the intellectual level isn't actually possible.
The experience came first and then people tried to find words to explain it.
To start from the explanation and think that that is already the truth is back to front.
Interestingly this is the battle waged between the theologians and the mystics. The mystics were all about this personal emotional experience which the theologians saw as all too human an experience that actually detracted from connecting with God. The theologians sought to meditate on the trinity so that in the end we are confronted with a profound silence as we become aware of the inability of human language and experience to penetrate the meaning of the divine. I'm not sure where I stand on this yet, I kind of like those bursts of emotion where I feel like I'm closer to God...
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