Sunday, June 10, 2007

GENESIS 8, or, "Land ho!"

Noah, his family, and the entire animal population of the world continue to float in the ark, God recedes the waters.

This is the chapter where we derive the olive branch as a symbol of peace. After floating on the ark for months, Noah sends out a dove to check for dry land and first it returns with nothing. The next time he sends it out, it returns with an olive branch. The next time the dove is released, it doesn't come back.

Once Noah and his family are on dry land, God thinks to himself that he'll never destroy living things on that scale again. The chapter closes with God thinking, "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and sinter, day and night will never cease." Which to me is an odd statement. It'd be like me saying, "As long as I'm alive, I'll live."

High Culture References to Gen 8: Picasso's line drawing "Dove with Olive Branch"

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Genesis 7, or, "God Katrinas the World"

God follows through on his promise of flooding the world; only Noah, his family, and a boat-load of animals are saved. Noah gets the worst case of prune fingers in history.

Genesis 7 continues the familiar story of Noah's ark. Noah takes the animals into the ark that he has built, and then God makes it rain for forty days and forty nights.

Forty, like seven, is a number repeated many times in the Bible. Other mentions of the number forty: the forty days Moses spent on Mount Sinai with God; the forty days and nights Elijah spent walking to Mt. Horeb; the Hebrew people wandered forty years traveling to the Promised Land; Jonah in his prophecy of judgment gave the city of Nineveh forty days grace in which to repent; and Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness fasting and being tempted by Satan, an event that is celebrated by Christians during Lent - the forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter.

The chapter ends with the ark still floating, the earth left in ruins in the water below.

Stories like Noah's ark make me wonder about the nature of God. In Gen 6, God sees how man has become corrupted, and we are told "The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain."

Passages such as these bring up questions like - Can God make a mistake? And, is God all-knowing? An omnipotent God, the kind of God most of us have grown up thinking of, would know the consequences of his actions before he makes them. If that were the case, then why would God create man only to then realize it was a mistake?

Thinking back on it now, I don't believe there has been any mention of God being "omnipotent", or "all-knowing"in Genesis so far. I will definitely be on the look-out for future passages that describe God in this manner. But for now, God is described as an entity who doesn't know the upshot of his actions.

A lot of people much smarter than myself have already thought through this type of question. One of them is phycist John Polkinghorne:

"I think we live in a world of true becoming. That's to say, I don't think that the future is fixed; I don't think God fixed it. I think God allows creatures to be themselves. If we live in a world of true becoming so that we play our little parts in making the future — and I believe God's providence also plays a part in making the future, and also the laws of nature that God has ordained play a part in constraining the form of the future — if that's the sort of world in which we live, then I think actually even God doesn't know the future. And that's not an imperfection because the future is not yet there to be known. Now, that's a very controversial view, and not everybody, by any matter of means has agreed with me about that, but that's how it seems to me.

And I think that, you see, there's been a very important development in theological thinking in the 20th century, and it's reflected in all sorts of quite different theologians, but they have this thing in common: They see the act of creation, the act of bringing into being a world in which creatures are allowed to be themselves, to make themselves, is an act of love and it is an act of divine self-limitation. The theologians like to call it kenosis from the Greek word, and so that God is not the puppet master of the universe, pulling every string. God has taken, if you like, a risk. Creation is more like an improvisation than the performance of a fixed score that God wrote in eternity. And that sort of world of becoming involves God's accepting limitations, and I believe, accepting limitations not knowing the future. That doesn't mean, of course, that God will be caught out by the future in the same way that you and I are. I mean, God can see how history is moving, so to speak, but God has to react to the way history moves."*

I think Polkinghorne gives compelling reasons to believe that perhaps God is not all knowing, and doesn't know exactly how his decisions will play out. I've pretty much given up on trying to reconcile what Genesis has to say with what science says, but looked at through Polkinghorne's lens of "true becoming", at least the story can make a little more sense with regards to God's character and motivations.

Pop References to Gen 7:
Penn and Teller give Noah's ark a thorough shakedown in their HBO series Bullshit. While I take issue with them pshawing the Noah story simply as a "bullshit myth", I think they do raise a lot of good points.



*Excerpt taken from John Polkinghorne's interview on NPR's "Speaking of Faith" with Krista Tippett. Read the full trascript HERE