Creation, Rebellion, Anticipation: Community Origins

Reading: Deut 4:32-40.

I. Origins
We'll look at how key biblical material contributes to the whole Kingdom ethic, starting with origins.
Origins frame the ethos of nations, families, and persons.

A non-tragic 'origin narrative' seems essential to human emotional and social health.

Genesis narrates Israel's origin (following the heavens, the earth, humanity, and Abraham)

as an act of God's providence.

Each stage in Israel's origin is ethically freighted, and rich soil for visions of goodness and ethics.

II. Creation: Just a Start
Gen 1-2: An act of God's utter sovereignty forging humanity's constitutive relationships with God, one another, self ("at last"), and all creation.

"It was very good." Creation expresses its own goodness, which is a gift from its good and trustworthy God.
This isn't perfection, but it's a great start.
"Creation mandate" theology depends (too?) heavily on this original vision to form moral imagination (e.g., James Davison Hunter, some Reformed ethics).
Divine command theory focuses on law and covenant, especially the role of following God's commands ("do not eat from the tree") as basis of flourishing, justice, and faith. In this case Eden represents merely the beginning of the disclosing of God's mysterious plan to unite all things. Some visions emphasize what's new (John 13's "new commandment"), where some emphasize what's common ('covenant' in Reformed theology; this would be the Adamic covenant).

Psalm 104, Proverbs 8, Hebrews 11:3, and esp. John 1 envision wisdom as creation's divine source, deep structure, glory, and inhabitant.

This grounds the so-called 'Abrahamic' traditions' hope and even optimism about life,
in stark contrast to the precarious sensibility of their neighboring animistic, polytheistic societies.
It's manifested in everything from family life to work to tradition to study and reflection to perseverance in the face of suffering.
If humans evolved from other species, that's a challenge to the vision, but not an insurmountable one. [Unpack? Haidt?]
The 'beginning of creation' is the Word, the second person of the Trinity made flesh (John 1:14, Col 1:13-20, Rev 3:14), whose work amounts to the 'new creation' of the old creation (Rom 8:18-23, Col 3:10, Eph 4:24, Rev 21:5).

Here creation's goal or telos (and thus teleology) is in some sense present in creation ('immanent'), not just in its creator ('transcendent').

Natural theology locates the ethics of common 'cardinal' virtue here in 'general revelation,'
since it's displayed across human differences,
discoverable/discernable through careful thinking (so Romans 1:18-20),
and can be spread through human effort (so the Queen of Sheba's devotion to Solomon's wisdom, which anticipates the world's debt to the thriving Jewish intellectual tradition).
Notions of universal natural rights, Kantian universal reason, and justice (including karma) also often appeal to creational wisdom.
A creation displaying some sense of its end is also hospitable to both a justice/merit outlook and a Platonism/return outlook.
However, multiple surprises are in store as the saga unfolds and creation's true goal comes into view.
That key stage is Jesus' incarnation, ministry, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension with a promise to return.
It comes to be called 'new creation' (Galatians 6:15).

We're only getting started in the Kingdom's story; very little is explained; yet there's already a lot to work with.
The proliferation of competing and conflicting models of ethics grounded here demonstrates this.

N.T. Wright, After We Believe:
Current western cultures tend to pursue goodness through imposing rules on behavior (goodness results or merits), and/or ‘being true to ourselves' (goodness expresses).
Both approaches fail and frustrate (e.g., Numbers). Camps tend to polarize. Double standards evolve (“rules for you, indulgence for me”).
Wright and Peter Kreeft are among those who prefer virtue ethics' emphasis on 'second nature' or realized human potential. Virtue ethics have classical, global, multicultural, and Christian pedigrees.
Aristotle: Virtues are habits, flowing into actions, directed by right reason (Jonathan Haidt's 'rider'), all according to will, yielding and embodying a “second nature” of human excellence. (Wright’s example: US Airways pilot Chesley Sullenberger.)
Vices are habits, flowing into actions, directed by passions (Jonathan Haidt's 'elephant'), exhibiting and fueling excess or deficiency that drives human failure (so vice isn't necessarily sin in these visions).
Both virtues and vices develop as they are cultivated.

Cardinal (‘hinge’) virtues are the basic set of qualities necessary for a shared ‘good life’:

Aristotle's: Temperance, prudence/wisdom, courage, and justice.
These are distinct but interdependent.
Aristotle: each virtue is a ‘golden mean’ between an ‘excess vice’ and a ‘deficiency vice’:
Courage is a mean between the excess of rashness/recklessness and the deficiency of cowardice/timidity. (Not every virtue is thus explained, and it's not clear that every virtue can be.)
There are more ordinary virtues (magnanimity, generosity, etc.).
Cultures’ and thinkers' lists differ, but overlap.
Wright: Christians highlighted the novel virtues of patience, humility, chastity, and charity.
These have come to be treated as 'general revelation,' obvious to observers, though they weren't and didn't arrive that way (Tom Holland, Dominion).

This is the basic classical-then-Christian model of virtue.

Like Proverbs, it is useful and true.
Like Proverbs, it is simplified and thus limited, sometimes severely (like a supply-demand graph in economics).
Like Proverbs, it is subtly contextualized to some broader telos or framework.
How does this basic model frame your successes your struggles your failures in your own life, family, work, discipleship?
Do you sense potential usefulness? problems?
Versus a rules-based approach?
Versus a self-expression approach?

The proliferation of conflicting models of ethics grounded here shows that satisfactory visions will need 'something greater.'

John 1 and Hebrews 11:3 also point far beyond these by displaying a grander teleology, whether subtly or emphatically: creation has a goal that lies far above and beyond mere maintenance or restoration.
Since original creation is the object of new creation, a creational ethic must be incomplete if it doesn't respect this.
The New Testament and early church found both divine command and Greek virtue ethics adaptable even to describing Christ’s work in salvation, so these will return.

But that gets us ahead of ourselves.

III. Rebellion: The Fall
Ecclesiastes comes after Proverbs because of the severe limits of creational ethics.
Gen 3: We depose God as king, at least in our own hearts (cf. Judges 21:25, 1 Sam 8:4-8).
Some assumptions to consider carefully:

Had Eden been a life of painless immortal leisure? Signs point in different directions. Eden feels like a head start, a nurturing environment in which to grow up.
Were Adam and Eve perfect? Obviously not, because they fell for a snake's trick (probably willingly). Saints are better formed and resilient, even anti-fragile.
Would children need raising? (They're already in view in Gen 2.) Why wouldn't they?
Were there moral challenges in Eden? Obviously; the snake is one. Moreover, it doesn't take much to arouse covetousness and mistrust. Virtues such as courage, patient endurance (raising children who grow up and leave), 'emotional intelligence', capacity to trust, and work all pertain to a life with or without sin.
So there's room to broaden ethics beyond just remedy for sin, and treat creational ethics (and others to come) as relevant apart from sin.

Our sinful rebellion is first against God and contrary to God's (barely disclosed) purposes,

carrying far-reaching cosmic, social, personal consequences.
Sin ruptures and disorders all relationships: with God, nature/creation's 'powers', structures, others, and our own elephant-riding selves.
What was a good start toward a glorious goal is misdirected, and creation must wait in frustrated pointlessness.
'Moral evil' now supplements and entangles 'natural evil.'

Gen 4-11: These consequences are displayed in the catastrophic trajectory of primordial human history:

genealogies interlaced with violence, superhuman power, judgment, disrespect, conspiracy, and confusion.
Paul: This is bigger than just humanity. Stoicheia structure human life, sustaining but scattering and enslaving the nations (Gal 4:3-10, Col 2:8, Rom 1:18-2:16).
Primordial narratives contrast God's now remote purposes (tele) with renegade teleologies and aimlessness.
This is true whether or not one reads them literally.
Blaise Pascal: "Man is neither angel nor beast, and unhappily whoever wants to act the angel, acts the beast."

IV. Depravity: unruly subjects.

As we see here in the primordial narratives and in Judges, doing what we individually see as right leads to chaos.
Furthermore, cultural sensibilities structure evil and disorder on larger social scales, even cosmically as 'the world.'
As we see later with Israel's Torah, rules are necessary to restrain evil, but don't bring righteousness.
What about Wright's prescription, virtue? In our fallen condition, virtues' benefits are real, but their limitations are severe.

Virtue must be comprehensive, but it's in short supply.

One vice constitutes a tragic flaw (e.g., pride, even fueled by courage).
So sympathetic tragic heroes outnumber melodramatic 'Hollywood' villains and archetypical heroes.
People display unequal inborn propensities that resist change. (E.O. Wilson's analogy of developed film.)
Virtuous people (such as Sullenberger) are thus rare.
Is sin at work here, not just scarcity? Christians say so; Paul, John, Augustine, etc. (following Psalms) root our failure in fundamental wrong in the world, not just unrealized human potential.

God's primordial measures against evil show the ultimate restraint against sin is the threat and reality of death: "dust you are, and to dust you shall return" (3:19).
The expulsion from Eden display other 'wages' of dispossession/repossession (3:23-24).
Cain, then Babel, displays sin's further trajectory as dispersal/disposal (Gen 4:11-12, 11:1-9).

Our failure deprives God of his goal that humanity transcend its beginnings and gain God's likeness.
How could a fractured and unruly humanity image its one God coherently?
Classical, Buddhist, Confucian, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, as well as secularish western ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ visions all differ: diagnoses, ends, prescriptions/means, and thus duties, rules, virtues and vices. [return to Kreeft's four great truths slide]
For instance, Confucian loyalty and western impartiality collide as systems of 'justice.'
Many ethical visions require judgment and foreknowledge that humans lack.
'Practical wisdom' and 'finding the mean’ struggle to negotiate tensions successfully and resolve internal contradictions.
Jesus’ virtues appear vicious to successful Pharisees.
Paul regards Pharisees' Torah-keeping as passions of "the flesh."
Don Richardson, Peace Child: Judas' betrayal was taken as a virtue.
Egoism and cultural relativism are tempting shortcuts, but they leave the fundamental problem unsolved and leave us scattered and at odds, counterproductive, and mortal.

Fig leaves: Coping with depravity.
What should we do in view of our moral confusion and fragmentation as well as virtue's scarcity and variety?
Aristotle's 'macro' solutions are largely workarounds:

virtue-nurturing relationships, true friendship among moral equals, aristocracy to spread the benefits of still-scarce virtue.

Classic American pragmatic solutions are too:

results through competition via market forces and separation of political powers seek to limit or leverage widespread vice (cf. Gen 11:6-8), sometimes creating new problems by their success (as wealthy Egypt enslaved its Hebrews).

Modern socialism seeks structural remedies:

pursuing results through collectivism, regulation, universal education, egalitarianism embrace the Torah's old strategy of 'sanctification by law' (cf. Rom 10:2-3), with disappointing and sometimes ironic results.

People cope personally by relying on

relationships (family, friends, voluntary associations including churches, group identities),
moral training (education, sports, Scouting),
diversions (entertainment, substances, work, nature; cf. Plaise Pascal on distraction),
detachment/withdrawal (including religious),
existential self-expression, and so on.
Ecclesiastes sees through all these (along with successors including Kierkegaard and Kreeft).

How does your life adapt and compensate because of virtue’s limits? In your family? In your workplace? In your church? In your personal affairs? How successfully?

V. Anticipation: The Patriarchs
The rest of the Torah chronicles 'infant' Israel's specific origin story as the beginning of God's full response to the challenge.

Israel is God's chosen covenant people, called to belong, know, and live in peculiar ways (1 Peter 2:9) for the sake of all.
Hints of a new telos appear in Genesis's promises and blessings to bring sinners into personal (interior and social) order and loving union with God.
From Genesis to John the Baptist, God is preparing a people through whom his Kingdom will arrive (Matthew 11:7-15).

I'll use categories from medieval spirituality (Dionysius the Areopagite) for God's 'prescription' for a good 'prognosis':

the purgative way ("Go!"),
the illuminative way ("Behold!"), and
the unitive way ("Come!").
All of these are already visible in this 'anticipation' stage of the Kingdom's history, and become much more obvious in the preparation and formation stages to come.

These are originally seen as simultaneous (St. Bonaventure),

but come to be envisioned as sequential (Hugh of Balma), coinciding with
the beginner, proficient, and perfect stages of spiritual growth (Evagrius, Jeremy Taylor, etc.).
I think that development is a Platonistic move away from the Kingdom's true biblical history.
I'll draw more loosely on them, and non-sequentially, to expose dynamics of moral formation.

Gen 12-32, 35: God's covenants with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob

-initiate gracious unitive relationships with unworthy, conniving, yet responsive people who become a new beginning.
-elect a people through whom to make YHWH's name known among all peoples.
-call them away from their old gods, surroundings, and lives.
-demonstrate that even a mustard seed-sized trust in God is enough to start (Jacob), but limitless trust is available (Aqedah). [Heb 11:17-21.]
-engage cultural features while subverting them (primogeniture, circumcision, etc.) to display God's otherness.

Gen 33-34, 36: Israel's difficult relations with neighbor nations

carry forward its fallenness indefinitely, so no system or structure will solve its moral dilemma or end its struggle.
[This was the story I led the 'goodness' lecture with.]
These frustrations and defeats also demonstrate God's determination to see his saving plan through.
They resemble our difficult circumstances too, showing that 'culture' itself is a moral obstacle, not just particular cultures.

Gen 37-50: The (often 'goodness gets') family's internal struggles displayed in the Joseph cycle

-resemble ours, showing even the smallest family's relationships to be mired in the same dilemma.
-disclose God's plan in intensifying illuminations (Abraham's sky and dream, Jacob's ladder, Joseph's dreams, and beyond).
-reveal the moral force of particular personalities (e.g., Jacob, Leah, Joseph) with changing moral character.

Gen 37-Ex 1: God sustaining the family in Egypt and then (Ex 1-18) liberating Israel from Egypt

are a kind of purgative 'delivery' of a people from its own gestation for a life of its own (cf. Gal 3:23-26, Luke 9:31!).

VI. How Is Genesis Ethical?
Up to now, there has been little substance concerning the three main concerns of ethics:

regarding deontology, few rules (and even less obedience);
regarding virtue, little on display, wilderness Israel has none to show;
regarding consequences, wholly ambiguous outcomes.
That's part of the power and charm of these narratives: they're realistic.

Yet these stories are Israel's heart and soul (and essential guidance for the NT church).

Peoplehood seems fundamental to human goodness, God's goal, and God's Kingdom (so Abraham in the NT).
More evident are faith, as well as hope (David J.A. Clines: for posterity, relationship with God, and land) and love:
Ex 19-31, Deut 4-30: in God's covenant with Israel following its exodus.
Ex 32-34, Deut 31-32: in the foreshadowing of Israel's apostasy, ruin, and restoration in the face of God's blessings.
Ex 35-40/Lev: in the contextual meaning of the apparatus of priesthood, ark, and tabernacle.
Num/Deut 1: in God's sustaining, judging, forgiving, and maturing Israel in the wilderness.
Deut 2-3, 33-34, Joshua: in the gift of the land's conquest, for the sake of the patriarchs.

So whether or not natural law is prior to grace in human ethics, divine relationship seems foundational.
Israel's first task is 'narrative ethics': Remember them (Deut 4:9-11, 4:23-24, Jewish Torah practice)

... in word and deed ("God remembered," Ex 2:24).
Israel forgets, is reminded, and learns to remember.
Jesus remembers and understands (Deut 8 in Luke 4:1-4).
So do his disciples (eventually). They echo and presuppose Old Testament traditions throughout the New Testament.
For instance, Paul appeals to Abraham and Sarah and their 'seed' as living through trust in God's promise (Rom 4, Gal 4).

"Salvation is from the Jews" (John 4:22; Rom 9:4-5): These origins are essential to the 'lesser' framework that will midwife the greater one.