Community Origins

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, and all creation.: 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.
Divine command theory focuses on law and covenant as basis of flourishing, justice, and faith.
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 animistic, polytheistic neighbors.
If humans evolved from other species, that's a (surmountable) challenge to the vision.
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.'
Notions of universal natural rights, Kantian universal reason, and justice (including karma) also often appeal to creational wisdom.
Jesus' incarnation, ministry, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension with a promise to return
comes to be called 'new creation' (Galatians 6:15).
II.2 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 its ethical potential.: N.T. Wright, After We Believe:
Current western cultures tend to pursue goodness through imposing rules on behavior, and/or 'being true to ourselves'. Both approaches fail and frustrate (e.g., Numbers).
Virtue ethics emphaze 'second nature' or realized human potential. Virtue ethics have classical, global, multicultural, and Christian pedigrees.
Aristotle: Virtues are cultivated habits, flowing into actions, directed by right reason, 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.
Cardinal (‘hinge’) virtues are the basic set of qualities necessary for a shared 'good life':: Aristotle's: Temperance, prudence/wisdom, courage, and justice.
Aristotle: each virtue is a 'golden mean' between an 'excess vice' and a 'deficiency vice'.
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.'
This is the basic classical-then-Christian model of virtue:: useful and true, simplified and thus limited, sometimes severely (like a supply-demand graph in economics), and subtly contextualized to some broader framework.
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.
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.

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? Saints are better formed and resilient, even anti-fragile.
Would children need raising? Were there moral challenges in Eden?
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 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.
(Michael Heiser: Gen 6 and Gen 11 are two further rebellions, with spiritual and metaphysical repercussions.)
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
Sin disorders our relationships with goodness:: Doing what we individually see as right leads to chaos.
Cultural sensibilities structure evil and disorder on larger social scales, even cosmically as 'the world.'
Rules are necessary to restrain evil, but don't bring righteousness.
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.
People display unequal inborn propensities that resist change.
Virtuous people are thus rare.
The ultimate restraint against sin is the threat and reality of death. The expulsion from Eden displays sin's other 'wages' of dispossession/repossession (3:23-24; cf. Michael Heiser on Gen 11:9 in Deut 32:8). 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.
Ethical visions differ, and many require judgment and foreknowledge that humans lack.
'Practical wisdom' and 'finding the mean’ struggle to negotiate tensions.
Jesus’ virtues appear vicious to successful Pharisees; Paul regards Pharisees' Torah-keeping as passions of "the flesh."
Egoism's and cultural relativism's shortcuts leave the fundamental problem unsolved and leave us scattered.
Fig leaves: How should we cope with moral confusion and fragmentation as well as virtue's scarcity and variety? Aristotle's 'macro' solutions, American pragmatism, and socialism's structural remedies are all inferior workarounds.
People cope personally by relying on relationships, moral training, diversions, detachment, and existential self-expression. Ecclesiastes sees through all these.

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.
Categories from medieval spirituality (Dionysius the Areopagite) simplify 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 the Kingdom's 'anticipation' stage.
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.).
That development seems a Platonistic move away from the Kingdom's true biblical history.
Gen 12-32, 35: God's covenants with the patriarchs: initiate gracious unitive relationships, elect a people, and call them away from old lives,
and engage cultural features while subverting them to display God's otherness.
Gen 33-34, 36: Israel's difficult relations: carry forward its fallenness yet demonstrate God's determination.
Gen 37-50: The family's internal struggles displayed in the Joseph cycle: resemble ours;
disclose God's plan through illuminations;
and highlight particular personalities.
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 (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.
More evident are faith, as well as hope (David J.A. Clines) 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 apparatus of priesthood, ark, and tabernacle.
Num/Deut 1: in God's shepherding Israel in the wilderness.
Deut 2-3, 33-34, Joshua: in the land's conquest.
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).
"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.