God, the Bible, and Human Consciousness

God, the Bible, and Human Consciousness

PREVIOUS PUBLICATION Scranton University Press, 2000. New Jerusalem: Myth, Literature and the Sacred. A study of mythic narrative in American literature

God, the Bible, and Human Consciousness Nancy Tenfelde Clasby

GOD, THE BIBLE, AND HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS Copyright Nancy Tenfelde Clasby, 2008. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-60543-5 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-37294-2 DOI 10.1057/9780230611986 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clasby, Nancy Tenfelde, 1938 God, the Bible, and human consciousness / by Nancy Tenfelde Clasby. p. cm. 1. Bible Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Bible Language, style. 3. Symbolism in the Bible. I. Title. BS511.3.C53 2008 220.6 dc22 2007041295 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: June 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 978-0-230-61198-6 (ebook)

For my husband, Gene, and all my children: Alison, Lance, Sarah, Jerry, Jacob, Erik, Ryan, Matthew, Jamie, and Jessica.

C ONTENTS Preface ix Introduction Logos, Mythos, and Truth 1 1 Genesis: Creation and Fall 29 2 The Protohistory 41 3 The Ancestors 51 4 Existential Exodus 77 5 Power: Kings and Prophets 97 6 Job 115 7 Reading the New Testament 133 8 Core Teachings 145 9 Discontinuities: The Break with Authority 157 10 The Passion 171 11 The Resurrection 193 12 Apocalypse 203 13 The Kingdom 213 14 Last Things 225 Notes 233 Works Cited 241 Index 251

P REFACE It is one thing to take religion as an object of study and another to take religion seriously. Stanley Fish Taking religious truth claims seriously means restructuring modern epistemology. The contemporary matrix for thought, logos, is a precision instrument aligned with logic and mathematical proportions. Its outcomes are univocal and literal. Logos has been so technologically productive that it is the standard for reality-based discursive thought. The Bible and other sacred scriptures are encoded in mythos, an orderly cognitive system based on analogy or comparative thought, rather than the analytical processes of logos. Such symbol systems elude literalist formulation. In this study, I will address the issue of biblical truth claims from the perspective of language formats. Mythos filters instinctively recognized realities dangers, love-objects through the format of archetypal images, rendering them as heroes, monsters, princesses, and all the familiar characters of narrative. Worship, like other instinctive behaviors, has epigenetic roots, neural coding predisposing the subject to a given activity (fight, flight, etc.). God is a central archetypal figure in mythos, appearing across all cultures. Like other archetypes, the image of God corresponds to a primary reality, a universal aspect of experience. The nature of that reality is unclear, but the god-image develops in predictable patterns reflecting cultural values. Dismissing religious imagery by arguing that worship is irrational is off-point. One might as well argue that singing and dancing are illogical or that Beethoven s Fifth Symphony doesn t make a lot of sense. Our most basic activities are conducted with little reference to logic or deduction. We run from danger, we hunt for food, we mate, we dance, and we worship. God, the Bible, and Human Consciousness is an effort to bridge the gap between logos and mythos and to clarify the archetypal structures of biblical imagery, making scripture more accessible to modern readers. It shifts the ground of discussion on such issues as the literal

x P REFACE truth of the Bible and proving the existence of God to another language format. Logos is due for re-evaluation because it has been overextended, applied in areas for which it is not suited. In some contemporary discourse, the language of rationality and clear thinking has narrowed to an exercise in instrumental rationalism. It is useful for sifting through a world of discrete, finished objects that can be counted, valued, and interchanged in precise numerical terms. In these areas, it may achieve objective truth. In evaluating cultural constructs, where counting is not an issue, it falls short of objectivity. Instinctive awareness, personal relationships, moral judgments, aesthetic experiences, value systems all these realities resist enumeration. Of course, anything can be quantified if it is translated into a technical formula. It is possible (but not helpful) to define the Hallelujah Chorus as the product of certain measurable harmonic sound waves. Happiness is caused by serotonin may be accurate from a pharmaceutical perspective, but it has limited general application. To avoid reductionism, it seems sensible to reject the notion that logos is a one-size-fits-all measure of truth. It is one format for processing our perceptions, for ordering the flood of raw experience. Mythos is another. Formats count: A DVD will not play in a VCR. Efforts to defend the truth claims of scripture must be cast in the appropriate format if they are to be intelligible. Understanding religion in its own language is important because worship is not going away. Religious strife causes enormous problems in our world, but if we repress religion, or ignore it or literalize it, it is even more dangerous. Herman Melville, who had his own problems with belief, acknowledged it as inevitable: Take God out of the dictionary and you would have Him in the street (To Hawthorne, April 1851; Melville 1952, 428). Like all instinctive behavior, religion is directed toward primary realities and is expressed in symbolic imagery. Reductionism pious literalism and misplaced logos distorts biblical symbolic structures. Archetypal figures underlie sacred scriptures and secular narrative, and they appear in cognate forms in every culture. They represent developmental realities so fundamental, so perpetually true, that they are encoded as part of the human genetic inheritance. Several new lines of inquiry in the cognitive sciences, in narrative forms, and evolutionary biology converge to suggest that worship appeared at the same evolutionary moment as speech. The capacity for constructing symbols and codes is the hallmark of our species, distinguishing us from other hominids. Infants may experience the sensory world in deep, unmediated ways, but a developed consciousness depends on codes and formats. Werner Heisenberg (1963) noted that, What we observe is not

Preface xi nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Symbols and stories are at the base of human interpretive systems. Storytelling today retains the original narrative patterns of the hero s engagement with the sacred powers. The fall from the garden and death/rebirth imagery structure modern narrative just as surely as they underlie world myth. Worship is about God, but it is also about power. Tribal gods often appear as natural forces or as formidable animals. Later patriarchal gods are more anthropomorphic, reflecting the power structures of the culture. Except for creation myths, sacred narratives focus more on heroes or demigods who interface with the heavenly powers, molding the divine image to fit human perceptive categories. As tribal structures faltered and power accumulated in the hands of the few, the nature of worship and the image of the hero changed. Tribal and patriarchal culture developed on the model of the extended family where loyalty guaranteed membership. The weak were tended to, and the strong, the heroic leaders, defended against alien predators. In the more structured systems of the later court societies, rulers replaced fatherly gods and concentrated their own power. With the rise of empires and urban cultures, in the Bronze Age, divinity was conflated with the powers of the state. Pharaoh and other rulers were regarded literally as gods. In the Axial Age (900 200 BCE), as a response to the great violence perpetrated by warring imperial powers, religious movements arose around the world emphasizing compassion as the key virtue (Armstrong 2006). Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, the Hebrew prophetic movement all rejected the arrogance and egotism of post-tribal individualism. Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, and Islam were late flowerings of the Axial Age; though they differ from one another, the axial religions emphasize peaceful, selfless generosity. They welcome strangers and provide for widows and orphans. In this context, love means calm, purposeful benevolence expressed in practical deeds of nurture and protection. The golden rule, do unto others as you would be done by, requires both self-control and empathy with the pain of others. These axial religions provide a thought-matrix linking love, pain, and pity in a powerful new way. This alignment permitted people, isolated and often enslaved by conquering powers, to love one another as if they had returned to the lost tribal garden. Today that religious matrix is obscured by other goals and considerations. To regain focus on compassion, it is essential to retrieve the symbolic language of the sacred scriptures of the modern world. If we study the Bible as a symbol structure and compare it not only with analogues in other sacred scriptures but also with the multitudes of hero stories in world literature, we come to an understanding denied to

xii P REFACE literalism, both pious and scholarly. Mythos, symbolic thought, opens a door to prerational experience. History overflows with riotous episodes of instinct gone awry; nevertheless, such inbuilt levels of awareness offer irreplaceable insights. Mythos is an essential source of meaning an ongoing, self-organizing thought-matrix capable of great refinement and subtlety. King Lear and the Book of Job are examples of mythos and cannot be evaluated simply in terms of logos. They are neither true nor false in a literal sense, but they carry deep meaning nonetheless. Archimedes claimed he could move the world if given a fulcrum and a long enough lever. Perhaps it is time to shift the fulcrum supporting modern structures of meaning. If the balance point is moved, the relative weight of meaning will shift. Mythos, now so situated as to be weightless, will acquire gravitas. It is our mother tongue; if mythos can be reappropriated in contemporary terms, taken seriously, rather than literally, our capacity for interpreting human experience will be greatly enhanced.