God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.
FOUR SONNETS ON EDEN: 1
WHAT MAKES FOR A SATISFYING PERFORMANCE?
It’s not easy to explain why one likes one performance of a work better than another, but two recent purchases have set me thinking about it. One of these I bought because I heard part of it on the radio and recognized some music I had struggled to play long ago, Bach’s Inventionen und Sinfonien. The performer was Till Fellner (ECM New Series). These pieces were written as exercises and don’t get performed all that much by professional pianists. But I always thought the ones I tried to play were really exciting music—if only I could have played them better. This is hardly surprising, of course, from a composer who could turn something as formal as a fugue into a transcendent experience.
Patrick White described the effect: “The organ lashed together the bars of music until there was a whole shining scaffolding of sound. And always the golden ladders rose, extended and extended, as if to reach the window of a fire. But there was no fire, only bliss, surging and rising. . . ” (Riders in the Chariot, chapter 9). The little Inventionen and Sinfonien don’t reach that high, but they find great range among the lesser human emotions, from sadness to peaceful content to a somewhat bumptious jollity. Fellner communicates all that.
This isn’t a matter of sentimentality. When Bach is played in an effort to evoke a particular emotion, it usually doesn’t work very well. On the other hand, Bach played only as a technical exercise or a demonstration of virtuosity can be tedious. How to describe the middle ground? I suppose it is a matter of performing with an awareness that the music does convey emotion and a willing cooperation with that. I’m not sure this is very clear or helpful, but it comes close to what I was hearing in Fellner’s performance of these “student” pieces—and of the Fifth French Suite that completes the album.
I think the complex structure of Bach’s music has sometimes been treated by modern tastes as equivalent to abstraction in the visual arts—the submergence of recognizable subject matter into pure form. But it’s hard for me to imagine that any Baroque music is truly divorced from emotion. It was an era fascinated by temperament and its accompanying emotions. Handel’s L’Allegro, il Pensoroso, ed il Moderato is a sterling example with its complex representation of the sanguine and melancholic temperaments. Even the turning away from them in the closing duet, which hails the advent of Moderation and the restoration of “intellectual day,” is full of deeply felt relief. (The poetry in that duet is lame, but the music may be the most stirringly beautiful Handel ever wrote.)
The other recording I purchased recently is Alexander Melnikov’s performance of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues (Harmonia Mundi), written two centuries after Bach but inspired by his Preludes and Fugues. This is—very unusually for me— the fourth recording of this work that I have owned. I don’t often acquire multiple versions, but I have an odd history with this work.
My first exposure to it was an LP with selections of the preludes and fugues performed by Shostakovich himself. I fell in love with them—not so odd for me, as I’m a sucker for fugues in general. After reaching a time when I no longer played LPs, I decided to look for a CD. My old recording was not then available in that format (though it now is) and I bought one by Tatiana Nikolaeva (Melodiya). It seemed the obvious choice, since she was regarded as the work’s great interpreter.
But I was disappointed. The pieces were beautifully played, but rather bland. I missed the wry sense of humor that animated Shostakovich’s own playing, the humanity he gave the pieces. I found that I seldom played my new purchase. When Keith Jarrett’s recording (ECM New Series) came out to great acclaim, I bought that. Much better, to my tastes. The music felt more transparent, more varied, less like a museum piece. But it still felt to me as if the humanity of the work was obscured.
After reading reviews of Melnikov’s recording, I debated for about a year whether I wanted to try again. I’m very glad I did. His performance has all the human vitality of Shostakovich’s own. Not that he imitates Shostakovich’s performance. The pieces I knew from the old LP sound quite fresh and distinct in his performance. But they convey an overall sense of the joys and sorrows, the dangers, stupidities, wonders, and even comedy of human life—perhaps intensified by the environment of the Stalinist era—transmuted into the abstract forms of prelude and fugue and waiting to be awakened and retranslated into a non-verbal message for heart and mind together.
Messrs. Fellner and Melnikov have accidentally united to give me new delight in music that I have long loved. Forgive my unseemly exuberance if I respond with an Amen! Hallelujah!
A ROAD TRIP IN TIME OF DROUGHT
A trip south to the Los Angeles area to visit family and friends took us through familiar terrain along Interstate 5. For some years, we have seen signs proclaiming that the drought was the fault of Congress (the specific object of wrath being environmental regulations protecting downstream waters). On the whole, however, we have not seen many signs of major damage until this trip. Yes, there were a few groves of dead trees. But orchards have their own life cycles, and we saw more orchards in infancy or youth than we saw dead ones. This time, however, we saw some mature orchards actually in the process of dying and more fallowed fields than we have been used to. The drought is tightening its grip, with or without the help of Congress. New signs are appearing that now lay the blame on the water consumption of California cities.
There are still green lawns in the LA area, but fewer than there used to be. Even the Getty Center, being the good citizen, had turned off most of its beautiful water features, leaving only the rivulet that runs down the to the pond by the great bougainvilleas. The gardens there were designed from the start to use relatively little water otherwise. Despite tales of people who continue to use water lavishly, there are many signs of civic responsiveness.
Just to keep us off guard, nature reminded us that this is a time not just of global warming, but of global weirding, giving us a first-class, midwestern style thunder storm in the middle of our ever-dry summer. It hung for an hour or so over Silver Lake where we were staying. Flashes of lightning followed immediately by deafening claps of thunder. Jon watched a tree on the other side of the street fall to the storm. The Fire Department arrived about fifteen minutes later, inspected, and apparently found no danger.
But the more interesting part of the trip from a gardener’s point of view was the return. On the advice of our friend Scott, we went north through Ojai, a beautiful little town with a very interesting artists’ collective called Ojai Valley Arts, then on north on state highway 33. The scenery is beautiful even when dry, but we found ourselves ascending into clouds and drizzle and an unfolding carpet of yellow flowers along the roadside—a lupine-like flower, about two feet tall, and a lower-growing thistle-like one. I’ve been unable to identify either more precisely from the two books I have.
From highway 33, we turned west down the Cuyama Valley, which looked much more desolate than the country along I-5. Much of the land seemed to have been fallowed; but, not having been there in a normal year, we found it hard to guess what it might look like in more favorable times..
We spent the night in Pismo Beach, with the bonus of a good view of the Pacific, complete with whale splashing about in the middle distance. Then north again on 101 till we turned off toward Carmel on Arroyo Seco Road and then Carmel Valley Road. There were places along Arroyo Seco Road that looked truly desolate. Even the oaks appeared to have died. Only when we crossed over toward the ocean side of the hills did matters improve. There we found great swaths of classic California: golden grasses under the broad, dark green branches of live oaks.
The impression, over all, was that the drought is certainly working major damage, not only to agriculture but to some of the native plant life. The dead oaks were particularly troubling. Had the water table been lowered by indiscriminate pumping? Possibly. Other terrains, however, seemed to be weathering the drought, albeit in a subdued state. And it didn’t seem to take much rain to bring the flowers on highway 33 out of hiding.
Next winter? Anyone’s guess, though the current prognostication is for a major El Niño event, which usually means rain for California. My own garden would be glad of that.
And a side-note, not climate related: we went to the Getty Center to see the Andrea del Sarto show—mostly drawings and a few oils. The drawings are mind-boggling in their elegance and detail and liveliness. Our friend Joseph told us to be sure to see the small exhibit on Degas and pastels, which proved to be a great treat, too. The little computer show on the making of pastels provided a fascinating enrichment to a choice set of works by Degas and contemporaries. We had a pleasant lunch on the terrace and returned to the galleries only to find them overrun by children with smart phones, taking pictures of everything as fast as possible and, as near as I could tell, actually looking at nothing. Their parents pretended not to know them. We decided to call it a day for the museum.
UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR III: THE GOSPEL OF MARK
The Gospel of Mark is something of a riddle. Lacking the narrative polish of Luke, the theological coherence of John, or the judiciousness of Matthew, it gives us few clues as to the perspective of the author. I think one such clue has gone largely unnoticed. It is found in what seems like a great contradiction at the heart of the work.
Early in his ministry, Jesus says to his chosen disciples, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that ‘they may indeed look but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand. . . .'” (4:11-12, quoting Isaiah 6:9, NRSV) And yet, from this point on, the disciples never really get anything right while a succession of outsiders, mostly nameless, show themselves to be people of great clarity, understanding and faith.
Mark gives the disciples a bad press, and some scholars take this as evidence that he distrusted them. Yet, his Gospel depends for its existence on the tradition they represent. It is primarily a story about what Jesus did with them and it ends—at least in the oldest ending we have for it (16:1-8)—with the angel sending them a message to meet Jesus in Galilee, as if they were about to begin the story all over again. Yet, the Gospel’s final words assert that the women who found the empty tomb and heard this message “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” A book that is hardly intelligible except on the assumption that its intended audience already knew the story of the resurrection winds up with yet another failure to grasp the message.
Mark’s book is addressed to a particular community, that of Christians, and narrates a tradition of Jesus’ teaching that lived on in that community. And, at the same time, he tells us that the disciples who preserved it did not understand it. Peter, for example, recognized Jesus as Messiah, only to rebuke him for predicting his own death at the hands of the authorities (8:27-33). And despite Jesus’ sayings about the necessity of his followers’ taking up the cross and their need for humility, the disciples are found arguing among themselves as to which of them was the greatest. At his arrest, one betrays, one denies him, and the rest disappear.
By contrast, we meet quite all these perceptive outsiders: people who had the faith to be healed by him and even the courage to be insistent with him (the Syro-Phoenician woman, 7:24-30; the father of the epileptic boy, 9:94), people who used his name to cast out demons and whom he defended against his disciples’ criticism (9:38-41), a blind beggar who dared to interrupt Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem (10:46-52), a scribe (part of a group usually seen as enemies in the narrative) whom Jesus described as “not far from the kingdom of God” (12:28-34), a poor widow whose piety Jesus held up as model (12:41-44). At the end, it was another outsider, Joseph of Arimathea, who did the pious deed of burying Jesus’ body after the disciples had fled and left the women without other help.
In this short series of posts on the scriptural witness to the tension between the universal and particular, Mark has a particularly important place. The Gospel is clearly focused on the Christian community and narrates a compendium of its tradition. This is specifically a Christian book. It belongs, one would think, pretty far toward the “particular” end of the tension. It is about how God has become the God of this particular community through the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
At the same time, it undercuts any Christian effort to claim unfailing wisdom, understanding, or insight, much less unique possession of God’s truth—the ever-present danger whenever we claim God as our own. Even though the first disciples were given the mystery (or “secret”) of the kingdom of God, they never, at least within the confines of this narrative, understand it. Nor does Mark imply that he or his generation of Christians possesses such understanding. What he hands on is the mystery itself. There remains for the faithful a lifelong journey into understanding it. And they may well meet some people along the way who have the kind of inexplicable insight that the Syro-Phoenician woman or the blind beggar had.
To put it another way, the God who works through the particular revelation of Jesus or the particular people of the church, always remains free to work with any human being and in the world at large. Even if we are steeped in the mystery, the tradition, the faith of our particular group, we remain quite good at getting its real meaning wrong and we may be found in fact less faithful and less perceptive than some outsider with no credentials at all.
This doesn’t mean that the particular is of no value. Without it, there is no story of God’s dealing with us to hand on, to learn, to interpret. But it does mean that scripture directs us to embrace both sides of the tension—both the God who has created all the world and the God who has called particular communities—wants us to lay hold on this God without trying to short-circuit the tensions involved. We find it easier to be either universalists or narrow particularists. Scripture keeps pressing us to be both at once.
BEGINNINGS: A Conversation with my Grandson
UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR: AMOS
Amos was the first Hebrew prophet we know of who wrote a book. We can even date his work to a particular time—the decade between 760 and 750 BCE. This was a period of great success and prosperity for the sister kingdoms of Israel and Judah, mainly because the dominant imperial powers of the Near East were all in disarray, allowing the two of them (with Israel as the senior partner) to dominate the weaker states around them and garner immense wealth in tribute and trade.
The rich and powerful people of the two kingdoms responded much like the “1%” of the US in the last few decades—amassing great fortunes, spending extravagantly on themselves, and refusing to take any responsibility for the effects of their behavior on the public at large or, more specifically, the poor. Religion was very much bound up with the nation’s prosperity, since people attributed it to the favor of their God (with much the same enthusiasm as Americans attribute ours to the favors of capitalism). The Temples were well endowed, the festivals well attended, the clergy as well satisfied as the plutocrats.
In the midst of this, Amos appeared unexpectedly at Israel’s royal sanctuary in Bethel with a message of judgement and destruction. He insisted that he was not a prophet at all—not, that is, part of one of the regular guilds of prophets at the temples. Some understand him to have been a poor shepherd; others see him as a stockman, owning herds and groves of the sycamore figs used as cattle feed. However he made his living, he was a brilliant poet. And he made a particular point of the tension we’ve already noted in Genesis between God as the universal God and God as the God of a particular nation.
The opening oracle of the book (chaps. 1-2) makes a tour of surrounding nations, denouncing each for its sins and promising due punishment. This implies that God is the God of the whole world, able to punish anyone at all. But the Israelite audience will also have heard Amos as saying that this was the work of their God, the one who favored them. Then, at 2:4, things start going wrong. The seventh nation condemned is not the enemy, but Israel’s sister kingdom and ally, Judah. And rather than quitting, as expected, after the seventh oracle, Amos keeps right on into an eighth, directed now at Israel itself.
Amos denounces the surrounding nations not for their paganism, but for violence and cruelty toward their enemies. He denounces Israel and Judah primarily for cruelty toward their own poor and for betrayal of their relationship with their God. In other words, Amos catches them up short by turning their assumption of religious advantage into a threat. Further on, God will say to Israel, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.” They expected “the day of the Lord” as their time of vindication. Amos says it will be not light and salvation, but darkness, judgement, and destruction (5:18-20). God will punish every nation for its inhumanity—Israel and Judah above all.
Amos’s God is indeed God of the whole world, as he declares in a short, but exalted poem that crashes into the sequence of oracles like a meteor:
The one who made the Pleiades and Orion,
and turns deep darkness into the morning,
and darkens the day into night,
who calls for the waters of the sea,
and pours them out on the surface of the earth,
the Lord is his name,
who makes destruction flash out against the strong,
so that destruction comes upon the fortress. (5:8-9, NRSV)
There is no hint here of a God who is merely Israel’s God.
Amos repeats the point in another short cosmic poem:
The Lord, God of hosts,
he who touches the earth and it melts,
and all who live in it mourn,
and all of it rises like the Nile,
and sinks again, like the Nile of Egypt;
who builds his upper chambers in the heavens,
and founds his vault upon the earth;
who calls for the waters of the sea,
and pours them out upon the surface of the earth—
the Lord is his name. (9:5-6 NRSV)
And then, Amos takes the matter still further as God tells the Israelites that they are no more special than any other nation, even the people furthest from them, even their enemies:
Are you not like the Ethiopians to me,
O people of Israel? says the Lord.
Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt,
and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Aramaeans from Kir? ((9:7 NRSV)
The prophet resolutely adheres to both ends of the impossible tension. God will destroy Israel because God is the universal God of justice and God will destroy them because God is their own God whom they have betrayed by their cruelty to the poor.
Christians, over the centuries, have repeatedly lost our grasp on this necessary tension. This is what has allowed people of faith to be seduced into unquestioning support for violence against enemies and for oppression of people who have been marginalized in our own society. We suppose that God is ours and will judge us more favorably. No. Violence, inhumanity, trampling on the poor and weak—all will be judged wherever they are found. And we who think ourselves particularly favored will be judged, if anything, more severely.
The point is that we can claim the particular love of God for ourselves only insofar as we allow it to be extended to the whole world. It is a hard notion to hang onto and we keep losing our grip on it. The scriptures have no purpose more fundamental or more valuable than this: to hold us to this tension and bring us back to it when we abandon it.
FROM A TRAIN WINDOW: NEW SOUTH WALES
My audio equipment is finally working and here is a poem for you:
EVANGELICALS AND THE SUPREME COURT
The Supreme Court, this past week, did three faithful and honorable things, one on behalf of housing for the poor, one on behalf of medical care for all, and (what interests me particularly here) one on behalf of marriage. I say “marriage” rather than “same-sex marriage” because this will actually prove a gift for all Americans by helping to create a public understanding of marriage that doesn’t depend on ideas of sexual hierarchy that are no longer meaningful in our world. It will become easier for all of us (heterosexual people included) to think of marriage as a union of two equal partners.
There will, of course, be a period of backlash, and I don’t minimize its danger. Backlash has an intrinsic weakness, since it is always more a stance against than a stance for something. No matter how much the radical right claims that they’re defending marriage, it will only get harder to see them as doing anything more than attacking a historically marginalized group. Still, we know from the recent murders in Charleston that backlash can continue exacting a mortal toll even after 150 years. There is no expiry date on human depravity.
But my question today is whether Evangelicals will be able to separate themselves from their recent history of making homophobia a stand-or-fall article of religion. There is a laudable effort in this direction on the part of some younger leaders. Older ones mostly seem to be digging the trenches deeper and raising the barricades higher. Given the direction of the population at large (including younger Evangelicals), they may well find themselves leading a much reduced army; but they have loud voices and plenty of money. Will the the rest of us simply have to wait for their decease? (Being pretty much of the same age as they, I do not expect that I will live to see that.)
I have always been perplexed that Evangelicals have committed themselves so intensely and irrevocably to this attack on same-sex marriage. The Biblical case for their position proves tenuous when examined closely, as I argued in the 2nd edition of Dirt, Greed, and Sex (the 12th Chapter, new to that edition). It is stitched together from a patchwork of texts in a way that ignores their substantial differences. It gets much of its power from the fact that it aligns so readily with homophobic feelings, a fact that even some conservative Evangelicals seem to be on the verge of recognizing.
Homophobia is a particular form of the basic human reaction of disgust—a reaction that has proven remarkably malleable, both for good and for ill. It was fundamental to the Nazi campaign to dehumanize Jews, but it has also been used historically to summon emotional energy on behalf of civic morality. The mistake is in assuming that disgust is, in itself, a warrant for an ethical judgment. Sometimes, it is something we need to unlearn or at least disregard. It would be very helpful to the whole conversation if every one involved were to read Rachel Herz’s fascinating and informative That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion (Norton).
Another part of the difficulty for Evangelicals is that they are prisoners of infallibility. (Yes, I know “infallibility” isn’t their preferred terminology, but it’s the everyday word.) Evangelicals, like other Protestants, like to think of themselves as the opposite of Roman Catholicism, but they’re very close to it in this respect. Both groups have, at least in theory, a source of infallible divine knowledge. And people who have committed themselves to this principle do not like it if their leaders start making strange noises about what the infallible source teaches. After all, what ‘s the good of an infallible source if it can change?
Witness the current conservative resistance to Pope Francis (God bless him with long life and health) as he begins to push back against the infallibilities of his predecessors. (Yes, I know that that’s not the right language from a Roman Catholic perspective, either, but I think it describes the current dynamics.) In Evangelical circles, the reaction will typically be even more sweeping and trenchant. For it is not, in practice, the Bible that is their infallible authority, but their received interpretation of the Bible, an interpretation of which the leaders of the churches are custodians. To change that is felt as virtually equivalent to changing the Bible itself.
In my less hopeful moments, I sometimes think that Evangelicals will prove to have killed Christianity in the US with their intransigence on this topic and such other issues as evolution and global warming (against), and laissez-faire capitalism and Armageddon (for). They have, after all, succeeded in christening themselves as the only real Christians—and the secular press has implanted that identification firmly in the public mind. It is hard to imagine a future where this kind of proud intransigence can continue to flourish. Even the durable myth of the glories of the Confederacy is beginning to crumble after 150 years.
God, to be sure, has pulled Christianity through other self-induced disasters, finding the right agents and the right times. But it won’t be easy to deconstruct the current entanglement of faith and unreason, whether in Evangelical reality or in public perception. God prosper those Evangelicals who are trying to do exactly that. For a long time now, the word “gospel,” which once meant “good news,” has sounded on Evangelical lips more like a threat than a source of hope. That was not always the case. I pray they can change it for the future.
A TALE OF TWO RECORDINGS
Schubert’s 9th Symphony, the “Great C Major,” always made a strong impression on me, but my recording of it disappeared about twelve years ago when Jon and I lost our CD collections to burglars. Last year I finally bought a replacement on the basis of a very positive review, but it proved disappointing. It was performed by a big orchestra with a perfectly blended sound. Given that Schubert employed a lot if repetition, the satiny quality of the sound made it downright soporific for me. I listened to it a couple of times, hoping to form an attachment, but couldn’t warm to it.
Recently, I turned the radio on in the middle of a performance that had me riveted at once. I’d never heard it before. It wasn’t the CD that had been stolen, which I must have liked, but don’t remember specifically. But it communicated exactly what makes me love this music. It turned out to be Charles Mackerras conducting the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
My first thought, before knowing who was playing, was that this was a good example of an “early music” interpretation–or what is now referred to more soberly as “historically informed performance.” What made me think that? The balance of winds against strings was stronger, giving greater clarity, and the orchestra played with attention to every phrase. Not even the repeats sounded automatic.
And, in fact, Mackerras’s notes for the recording show that he had consulted Schubert’s original score—and even made the surprising discovery that the opening andante is actually marked cut-time, not common time as in the editions. In other words, it need to be played about twice as fast as it usually is. He also noted that the ratio of violins to other instruments in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was about what Schubert would have known.
The different instrumental balance altered the listening experience. There was no wall of blended sound, but something more like chamber music, with the various voices engaged in a dialogue that steadily moves the argument along. Even with a smaller ensemble, the Scots managed some splendid fortissimos that were all the more impressive because they can also play so quietly.
But equally important was the attention to phrasing and to what I think of as the “rhetoric” of the music—that business of moving the argument of the piece along. I like Mackerras’ decision to give the second movement almost a “funeral march” quality, where my other recording treated it more as a kind of dance, which made the following scherzo seem unnecessary. It wasn’t a matter of tempo. Mackerras’s second movement is actually a bit shorter and his scherzo much shorter. It’s a matter of giving the music a well-thought-out profile.
I find the same qualities in the series of Beethoven symphonies performed by David Zinman, conducting the Tonhalle Orchestra of Zurich—a gift from my daughter to replace (you guessed it) a set lost in the burglary. Again, Zinman is not an “early music” musician as such. Even though he uses the latest edition of the symphonies, the orchestra plays modern instruments (which, for that matter, I think the Scottish Chamber Orchestra does).
Still, there’s the same quality of clarity and thoughtful phrasing and rhetoric—things that, as I said, I have associated with the historically informed performance folk. And I think it was, in fact, this movement that got people looking at the original documents and trying to recover practices that had been submerged in the growth of larger orchestras and more powerful instruments. A lot of the lessons, in the hands of great musicians, have filtered over into modern-instrument contexts where nobody has struggled to master cranky 17th or 18th century instruments. It encourages musicians, paradoxically enough, to get a new take on the music instead of repeating the conventional one.
All to the good. And yet, there is nothing quite like having it all. An evening with the brilliant Nic McGegan conducting the “early music” Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra is one of the chief musical blessings of life in the Bay Area. Nobody will ever know for sure that what we hear there is “authentic” or exactly what the composer intended. It is just wonderfully energetic, intelligent, nuanced performance where you can really hear what’s going on in the music and the results are predictably gripping.
UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR: GENESIS
In reading scripture, look less for settled answers (on which generations of readers have failed to agree in any case) than for guidance in exploring the questions of human existence and faith that are always with us. What you will then find is pointed reminders of important things we would rather ignore.
Genesis is a good place to begin because it embodies one of the most fundamental tensions in the whole of scripture—the tension between God as the God of all creation and God as the God of a particular human group. It’s foreshadowed in the two creation stories that begin the work.
In the first (1:1-2:4), God is remote and transcendent: creating by means of pure Word, towering over the creation even when expressing satisfaction with it, fashioning a complete world with all its elements in place and no real reason to expect anything more to happen. Since it is perfect, why should there ever be anything new under this sun?
In the second (2:5-25), we see instead a God who works up close—willing to get dirty in the mud, breathing God’s own breath into the mouth of a clay figure, lingering in Eden to associate with Adam and Eve as friend and companion. And this Eden contains the possibility of change and imperfection—of history, in other words—in the form a tree against which the humans are warned.
The two stories agree on much. In both, God is the one and only source of creative power. Like any ancient monarch, God has assistants in the task (“Let us make man in our image. . .”)—but no independent counterpart, no associate or opponent in the work, no equal. Again, in both, humanity is part of a larger creation—one species among many, albeit with a distinctive role.
Still, the “feel” of these stories is quite different. The first story is more abstract. The relation between God and humanity is described analogically as “image and likeness.” The second is more concrete, treating the first humans as something God has actually handled, breathed on, and befriended. The one is distant, the other intimate. The one abstract and comprehensive, the other concrete and specific.
It isn’t easy to combine the two stories into one. And scholars have long held that they were originally independent stories brought together here by a process of collecting and editing. The editors of Genesis can hardly have failed to notice the difference between them, but they chose to leave it in place rather than harmonize them.
We will find this tension between universal and particular shaping the rest of Genesis—indeed the whole of the scriptures. God is universal, firmly related to the world as a whole and to humanity as whole. And yet, by the end of Genesis, the focus has narrowed first to the offspring of Abraham, then still further to the family of Jacob. Genesis 49, the “Blessing of Jacob,” focuses on the future of Jacob’s twelve sons, eponymous ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel. Chapter 50, narrating the burial of Jacob and the death of Joseph, focuses on Canaan as Israel’s true home (largely ignoring the reality that it is already occupied by other people).
Does this narrowing focus mean that the Creator is no longer interested in the other offspring of Adam and Eve? People have often taken such an impression away from Genesis. To do that, we have to set aside the creation stories at the beginning, but we’ve found that easy enough—exactly the sort of failure that makes a new kind of reading necessary.
This kind of failure is hard to avoid. It haunts human existence. Because we are finite beings, we tend to define humanity in terms of the people we know, the people who are like us, our family, our clan, our religious community, our nation. Humanity as a broad category has been only faintly intelligible to us since the time when our first ancestors multiplied and spread to the point that they formed distinct groups, little if at all known to one another. Each group saw itself as the only true humans.
In the same way, people persistently think of God in relation to their particular group. The attention of God in Genesis moves from humanity as such to the descendants of Jacob. Christians, reading in the confidence of our own relationship with God, then substitute ourselves as the privileged group and put even the Children of Jacob in the position of outsiders. And yet, what can it mean for any of us to think of ourselves as human beings unless we can think of other human beings in the same terms?
This is not a tension we can escape. It is built into our humanity. Because we are finite, the things that we see and touch, taste and smell, the things that shape our memories, are more real to us than things we can recognize only through abstract exercises of the mind. This is why the love of nation or tribe so often trumps the love of humanity when push comes to shove. Our concrete, finite, localized existence creates human cultures rich in invention and diversity, but it also makes war, oppression, and violence against “outsiders” easy for us.
If God is equidistant from all, how can God become intimate with any? if God is intimate with a few, how can God be equally the God of all? A God who is equidistant from all risks becoming irrelevant to daily life. Like the High God of ancient religion, such a God may be revered but is too remote to be much worshipped or loved. On the other hand, we demand that the God who is intimate with us take our group’s side against all others. Abraham Lincoln captured the resulting absurdity in his Second Inaugural Address, speaking of the two sides in the hideously destructive Civil War: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.”
The genius of Genesis lies partly in the way it hangs on to both sides of this tension. If we read it carefully and remember what we read, it will make it harder for us to let go of either side, however strong the temptation.
This is not, of course, the only important thing to be learned from Genesis, and I expect to return to the book later on. But, in my next post on this topic, I plan to move instead to Amos, who tries to hold the universality and the particularity of God together in a context that radically resisted.