The intro to Ruth in The Books of the Bible notes that Genesis to Judges traces the formation of the nation of Israel, and Samuel–Kings details the development of the monarchy. In between is Ruth, which begins "In the days when the judges ruled" and ends with the genealogy of King David. Ruth is a bridge book that tells the story of how Israel's beloved (most of the time, anyway) king could be a fourth-generation Moabite.
Remember in the preceding narrative that the Moabites made life difficult for their second cousins the Israelites as the latter fled from centuries of slavery. The curse for this inconsiderate treatment was that no Moabite would enter YHWH's assembly even to the tenth generation. Part of me says this meant NEVER, but some people took it literally. So if you had Moabite blood, you had to prove that it was at least ten generations ago before you could worship in the temple.
How could David get way with entering YHWH's presence, let alone become the leader of YHWH's people, after only four generations? His great-grandmother Ruth redeemed the Moabites. Sure, the story points out that it's Elimelek's family name that's redeemed, and by extension Ruth herself, but note what happens. In the bigger picture, a Moabite could now point to King David and say, "He gets into the assembly. Why not me?" And it was Ruth's kindness and commitment to follow Naomi and YHWH that brings about this change.
Two women in a desperate situation somehow change the course of foreign relations because the foreigner behaved like a true Israelite. This is where trickle-up foreign relations works. Ruth removed the curse of her entire people by doing exactly what her ancestors failed to do the first time.
Monday, June 18, 2012
Saturday, June 16, 2012
The evolution of Homo spiritus
A while back, I posted some thoughts on evolution as it relates to the Holy Spirit and sexual ethics. An understanding of evolution (provisional though mine is) helps to make sense of the kind of beings we as humans are.
I’ve been reading in two books lately, The Return of the Chaos Monsters and The Lost World of Genesis One, how the creation poem seems to narrate how the world became functional, not how it was materially constructed. It also indicates how God built the cosmos as his temple, and the seven days show more of an inauguration of his temple than anything. The seventh day was when God sat enthroned and everything was functioning as it should, which meant that he could rest.
This understanding allows for immense possibility in the material construction of God’s temple, his creation, and in the constitution of his priesthood, humans. If God did allow “lower” species of primates to precede humanity genetically, it seems that he took, say, an ape and breathed his spirit into it. This created a species I call Homo spiritus or, for theological purposes in Greek, anthropos pneumatikos.
God created a species that was a step beyond Homo sapiens, and when this species rebelled, they lost something, devolving so to speak. They devolved into Homo sapiens, losing their human capacity to appropriately house the Spirit of God. Homo spiritus had all the features of Homo sapiens, but without the chaos we see today.
Homo sapiens retains a vestige of the image of God and is still capable of ruling God’s creation with him. However, the average Homo sapiens lacks the Spirit of God dwelling within in an unmediated way. So our ruling turns more toward chaos than order. In fact, according to The Return of the Chaos Monsters, our disorderly ruling invites chaos back into the creation. See what Genesis 6 says: “YHWH saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.” This sort of disorderly living fights against the good, functional orderliness of God’s creation.
We are wicked priests who by our own actions destroy the creation we are supposed to mediate to God. (Think of Hophni and Phinehas, the priest Eli’s sons, who slept with the women who served at the entrance to the tent of meeting. This was the ultimate abuse of authority, taking advantage of those who they should be representing before God and to whom they should be representing God.)
What does it mean to be a “spiritual person”? It’s one who has the presence of God dwelling in them, and they make decisions consistent with God’s intentions for his creation. We are, after all, co-rulers with God, and those who do the best job of this will wish for and, as God’s Spirit lives in them, bring worship to God as priests in his temple.
The “natural person” (anthropos psuchikos) is Homo sapiens. Nothing “wrong” with being one, but it simply means that one is not fully evolved. In the “natural” order of things, if a person finds out they are more highly evolved than someone else, they will embark on all manner of horrible actions. Think of all the calculation of races in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was a thinly veiled attempt to turn other humans into lower species so the dominant groups could enslave them. But Homo spiritus by definition would not do this. Humility and self-sacrifice are features of this species. The apostle Paul shared a pretty good list of characteristics with the churches in Galatia: “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” Sure, at this point in history, a Homo spiritus will likely revert to Homo sapiens in self-justification and condemnation. But hopefully, they will repent and take the evolutionary step back to Homo spiritus.
I’ve been reading in two books lately, The Return of the Chaos Monsters and The Lost World of Genesis One, how the creation poem seems to narrate how the world became functional, not how it was materially constructed. It also indicates how God built the cosmos as his temple, and the seven days show more of an inauguration of his temple than anything. The seventh day was when God sat enthroned and everything was functioning as it should, which meant that he could rest.
This understanding allows for immense possibility in the material construction of God’s temple, his creation, and in the constitution of his priesthood, humans. If God did allow “lower” species of primates to precede humanity genetically, it seems that he took, say, an ape and breathed his spirit into it. This created a species I call Homo spiritus or, for theological purposes in Greek, anthropos pneumatikos.
God created a species that was a step beyond Homo sapiens, and when this species rebelled, they lost something, devolving so to speak. They devolved into Homo sapiens, losing their human capacity to appropriately house the Spirit of God. Homo spiritus had all the features of Homo sapiens, but without the chaos we see today.
Homo sapiens retains a vestige of the image of God and is still capable of ruling God’s creation with him. However, the average Homo sapiens lacks the Spirit of God dwelling within in an unmediated way. So our ruling turns more toward chaos than order. In fact, according to The Return of the Chaos Monsters, our disorderly ruling invites chaos back into the creation. See what Genesis 6 says: “YHWH saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.” This sort of disorderly living fights against the good, functional orderliness of God’s creation.
We are wicked priests who by our own actions destroy the creation we are supposed to mediate to God. (Think of Hophni and Phinehas, the priest Eli’s sons, who slept with the women who served at the entrance to the tent of meeting. This was the ultimate abuse of authority, taking advantage of those who they should be representing before God and to whom they should be representing God.)
What does it mean to be a “spiritual person”? It’s one who has the presence of God dwelling in them, and they make decisions consistent with God’s intentions for his creation. We are, after all, co-rulers with God, and those who do the best job of this will wish for and, as God’s Spirit lives in them, bring worship to God as priests in his temple.
The “natural person” (anthropos psuchikos) is Homo sapiens. Nothing “wrong” with being one, but it simply means that one is not fully evolved. In the “natural” order of things, if a person finds out they are more highly evolved than someone else, they will embark on all manner of horrible actions. Think of all the calculation of races in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was a thinly veiled attempt to turn other humans into lower species so the dominant groups could enslave them. But Homo spiritus by definition would not do this. Humility and self-sacrifice are features of this species. The apostle Paul shared a pretty good list of characteristics with the churches in Galatia: “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” Sure, at this point in history, a Homo spiritus will likely revert to Homo sapiens in self-justification and condemnation. But hopefully, they will repent and take the evolutionary step back to Homo spiritus.
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