OPEN BOOK, Views & Reviews, No. 35
Copyright (c) 1997 Biblical Horizons
October, 1997
The Empire Strikes Back is a movie most of us have seen more than once. It is generally regarded as the best of the three Star Wars films, which is probably due to the fact that unlike the other two, The Empire Strikes Back made use of the services of a professional science fiction writer, Leigh Brackett, a veteran of the SF golden age of the 1940s.
If we look past the special effects and the overall drama of the film, however, we notice some curious symbolism, which it is my purpose here to explore briefly (and which is probably due to the talents of Brackett.)
The Stars Wars trilogy is a heroic tale with two heroes. Han Solo is the action hero, while Luke Skywalker is the spiritual hero. As is typically the case in heroic narrative, the first part of the story deals with the initial triumphs of the hero(es), while the second part deals with defeats and tribulation. Only after such a trip through the valley of death is the hero ready for the final victory in the third part. Part of what makes the second film of the Star Wars trilogy the most attractive of the three is that suffering creates a more sympathetic response from the audience/reader than does victory.
As a signal of the valley of death that our heroes must pass through, The Empire Strikes Back employs the symbolism of caves. Three times the significant events for both heroes happen in caves. Considering our action hero first, we find that the story of Han Solo involves his romance with the heroine, Leia Organa. The first cave is the ice-cave in which the rebels are holed up at the beginning of the film. Han heroically saves Leia when the cave comes under attack. They have several lovers quarrels as Leia pretends not to be interested in Han.
After escaping from the ice planet, Han and Leia enter a cave in an asteroid. There they have their first kiss. The cave turns out, however, to be a giant space monster, from which they barely escape due to Han’s heroically quick responses. This Jonah-like story hints at death and resurrection.
The third cave into which Han enters is indeed a death. He is lowered into a quick-freezing apparatus and is encased in carbon ice. As he descends into this last cave, Leia professes her love for him. Like Jesus on the cross with His mother and John, Han gives Leia into the hands of his compadre Chewbacca for safekeeping.
The three caves into which Han and Leia enter have to do with their blossoming love, which is threatening to each of them emotionally: confusing the self-controlled Leia and melting the tough-guy Han. The cave is risky, and becomes a place where one dies to one’s old self and begins to come to life again as someone new.
Let us now turn to the three caves entered by the spiritual hero, Luke Skywalker. Han’s weapon is a blaster, but Luke’s is a sword — indeed, a sword of light, the weapon of a Jedi mystic. While Han must conquer his arrogance and fight bad guys, Luke must conquer his soul and bring peace.
The signal that something important is going on in the caves is this: In each case the hero, Luke, is hung upsidedown. How often have you ever seen the hero hung upsidedown even once in a film, or read of it in a story? This is quite deliberate, and symbolizes the inversion of fortunes. The hero is experiencing a reversal. Note that Han, the action hero, is not inverted. Inversion is thus a sign of spiritual trauma rather than of physical. (It would have been a simple matter for Lucas and Brackett to have shown Han Solo lowered into the carbon freeze apparatus upsidedown. That they did not do so is significant: Han’s crises are not the same as Luke’s.)
First, Luke is captured by an abominable snowman and hung upsidedown in the ice to be eaten later. He is badly bruised and bloodied, and this scene at the beginning of the movie anticipates the last cave scene, wherein Luke loses his hand.
Second, Luke goes to a swampy, mystical planet to be trained in spiritual arts by Yoda. The whole planet is like a cave, and twice we are shown Luke trying to learn the mystic arts while suspended upsidedown. Then Luke is sent underground into a cave to face his worst enemy, who turns out to be, despite appearances, not the evil Lord Darth Vader, but Luke himself. Luke’s apparent failure to learn what this confrontation means dismays Yoda. This scene also foreshadows the third cave scene.
The third cave is the inner core of Cloud City. There Luke fights Darth Vader and loses his hand, but saves his soul by being willing to die rather than join with evil. Flinging himself from a bridge, Luke drops down through the cave and emerges to hang suspended upsidedown on the spokes of an antenna that looks like a cross, from which he is rescued by Han’s friend and symbolic surrogate Lando Calrissian. The cross is here not a symbol for Luke’s willingness to die for his friends, but merely of suffering.
Luke’s rescue by action hero Lando corresponds to his earlier rescue by Han Solo. After the first cave incident, Luke used his light sabre to escape the abominable snowman, but nearly froze to death until Han found him.
It seems that the spiritual hero needs the action hero, and vice versa. Luke’s freezing in the cave at the beginning of the film foreshadows and balances Han’s being frozen at the end. Han rescued Luke, and at the beginning of the third film, Luke will rescue Han.
Yoda’s lesson to Luke at the second cave was this: "Your weapons — You will not need them." Luke carries his light sabre into the cave anyway, but it proves useless in fighting himself. In the final confrontation with Darth Vader in the caverns of Cloud City, however, Luke’s hand is cut off and his light sabre is lost. Now he does not have his weapons. If he has not learned Yoda’s lesson, and still relies on the power of weapons, he will have to surrender to Vader, who tells him that the power of evil is greater than the power of good. At this point, Luke is not facing Vader but himself. What will he do? Happily, Luke has learned his lesson, and rejects the way of power and evil for the way of wisdom and love, which he employs to save Darth Vader in the third part of the story.
To be sure, from a Christian standpoint there is a lot lacking in this narrative; yet, there is much to appreciate as well, especially when we note how carefully the story has been crafted.
Biblical Chronology, Vol. 9, No. 10
Copyright James B. Jordan 1997
October, 1997
Now that we have examined three unacceptable approaches to the events recorded in Genesis 1, it is only fair for me to set out what does seem to be recorded there.
To begin with the source of this narrative: Since no human being was present to observe these events, we must assume that this narrative was revealed directly by God to a human author. There are three ways this might have happened. First, we might read, "God said to Abraham (or Joseph or Moses): "In the beginning I created the heavens and the earth…." This is not what we find, however. Thus, if Genesis 1 was originally dictated to a human author (as God dictated Leviticus to Moses), that author rephrased it in the third person.
Second, it might be that Genesis 1 came about indirectly through Divine inspiration, as the Psalms, for instance, came about. In this case, the human author would be reflecting on God and creation and would be moved by insight into composing this narrative. This, however, seems quite unlikely. After all, what information would the human author have to reflect upon?
Third, and this seems most likely to me, God revealed these things to a human author, who then, under inspiration, wrote up the matter in this form. It may well be (and probably is the case) that God told all this to Adam, who passed it on in documents to his heirs, through Noah, to whoever wrote up the final version that we have in Genesis.
(By way of parenthesis, we have to question the notion of some "oral tradition" from Adam forward. Human memory is quite selective, and that is why some form of writing has always accompanied human endeavor. Written language is for the purpose of memorializing, and functions differently from oral language. God both speaks and writes, as He wrote the Ten Words, and so we can be pretty sure that Adam — His image — wrote as well as spoke.)
Now, who was the human author of Genesis 1, and when was it written? It is usually assumed that Moses wrote Genesis, but the Bible never says this, and there is no particular reason to think Moses was the author. To put it another way, all the arguments for Mosaic authorship are purely circular; to wit, some parts of Genesis lay the foundation for Exodus, something that would be true whether Moses wrote it or not. My own best guess is that Joseph wrote Genesis in its definitive form (requiring only a few additional notes from Moses and Samuel), so that Genesis was the Bible that the Hebrews had with them while they were in Egypt.
It is important to reflect on this question because there are many commentators on Genesis 1 who try and explain various parts of the passage against the background of Moses’ experiences and education in Egypt. Supposedly, for instance, in Genesis 1 Moses is providing a reply to the cosmological notions of the Egyptians. Such an assumption is wholly gratuitous, and is a dangerous red herring drawn across the path of the interpreter, diverting him from paying close attention to what the text actually states.
With these things in the back of our minds, let us now turn briefly to what Genesis 1 does say.
Heaven and Earth.
The creation narrative describes God’s making the world over the course of a week. God’s work is cosmic and covenantal. The language in Genesis 1 is used in covenant-making events later on in the Bible, and some have noted this and then asserted that Genesis 1 is concerned with covenantal ordering, not with cosmic ordering. But the only cosmos that exists is God’s covenantal cosmos, so any attempt to pit covenant against cosmos is unwarranted. Indeed, any such attempt moves in the direction of gnosticism and "heilsgeschichte," the modern gnostic notion that God’s "salvation history" operates outside the realm of spatio-temporal cosmic history.
Sometimes it is argued that either the first statement of the narrative, or else the first two verses, are an introduction and are not part of the seven days. I fail to see how one can argue one way or another grammatically with any certainty, and it makes no difference to the chronology in any event. If God created the heavens and the earth, with the earth unstructured, empty, and dark, and left it that way for a trillion years — so what? What does it matter? Indeed, what would be the point? We should note, however, that the darkness of the original condition is directly related to the light-making work of the first day, which certainly implies that all of this was the work of the first day. Not having any sound reason for separating verses 1 & 2 from the first day, we shall consider them as part of it. After all, since the first day is the FIRST day, clearly it is also the introductory day.
In the beginning God created heaven and earth. He created two things, not one. These two things are, by implication, related to one another, linked in some way. Later this will be spelled out. For now, we notice two things that are linked: a covenantal structure.
The earth as it was made was good, of course, but not yet developed. It lacked structure, was empty, and was dark. Nothing like this is said of heaven. Indeed, it is clear from the rest of the Bible that heaven was made structured, full, and bright from the beginning. The angelic host does not multiply, and so new angels do not appear in the process of time. Humanity was created as a race that matures into a host, while the angels were created as a host from the beginning.
The earth matures in a way that heaven does not. Heaven is thus the model or paradigm for the earth. The earth is to grow more and more heaven-like. In the rest of the Bible, when heaven opens, men see the models they are to reproduce on the earth, as when Moses was shown the model for the tabernacle.
Right away we notice something that has somehow escaped the notice of virtually all commentators, which is that the earth must mature in three areas, not just in two. Genesis 1 is not concerned only with structuring and filling, but also with light.
The original earth had three zones: the earth below the waters, the waters, and a space of darkness over the waters. Above these, and not yet separated by any barrier, was the heaven. These four zones correspond to the four elements, the four states of matter:
Heaven fire energy
Air air gas
Water water liquid
Earth earth solid
Day 1.
Assuming that God created this configuration at the beginning of Day 1, in the evening that precedes the morning, we find on the second half of this day that He makes light. This would have been in the morning of that day.
Verse 2 presents two things over the earth:
Darkness was over the face of the unstructured deep, and
The Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.
Thus, the Spirit had been inserted into the earthly realm from the heavenly realm, proceeding from the Father and the Son.
Then God said, "Let there be light." The only source for that light is the Spirit Himself. When God appears later on in the Bible, He is surrounded by the glory, which is associated with the Spirit. Indeed, His glory hovers over Israel in the pillar of cloud & fire. Thus, the initial light came from the Spirit. Light is energy, fire; and so now fire is brought into the earth from heaven. This begins the transfiguration of the earth, from glory to glory.
Confirmation of the idea that the Spirit is the light-bearer at this point comes from Psalm 104 – if confirmation is even needed. Psalm 104 is a reflective commentary on Genesis 1, and proceeds through the seven days in order. The first day is discussed in the first four lines (vv. 1-2a). There God is said to cover Himself with light as with a cloak. Thus, the Psalmist understood the light of the first day as a light from God.
If we think of this configuration in terms of a flat earth — which we may certainly do since that is how we experience the earth — we see it as a four-deck universe. Nothing in the passage, however, excludes also seeing an earthly sphere, covered with water, covered again with airy space, and surrounded by heaven. The passage can be read equally well either way.
We conclude by noting that the insertion of the Spirit of God into earthly life is the way God always renews and reinitiates His covenant. Compare the glory moving into the tabernacle in Exodus 40, and into the Temple in the days of Solomon, and into believers in the New Covenant.
Day 2.
On the second day God created the "firmament" and separated waters above and below it, and called it "heaven." If the first day took care of the darkness problem, the second day begins to take care of the unstructuredness problem. God does not call the work good, however, until the mid-point of the third day, when the separation of land and sea completes the structuring work. We may ask why God did not do both structuring works on the second day. At least part of the answer is so that the third day is chiastically related to the fifth, so that land and sea are answered by the creatures of land and sea.
Structure seems to be related to water here. The word we have translated "unstructured" is in Hebrew "tohu," and the word for the "deep" (which we rendered "unstructured deep") in Genesis 1:2 is "t-hom" — apparently the same root word. Thus, the unstructured nature of the primeval creation is primarily associated with the waters over the earth, and when those waters have been structured, then the problem is solved. (Compare also in Genesis 2, where the four rivers that flow from the Edenic plateau structure the lands of the rest of the world.)
[The relationship between "tohu" and "t-hom" is obvious to the ear and to the eye, yet scholars have ascribed them to two different semitic roots. Even if this dubious attempt to separate these two terms be correct, they are clearly related by "pun" here in Genesis 1. Not only so, but in Genesis 1 it is precisely the "t-hom" that is "tohu" and that needs to be separated and structured. I must add that it is sometimes argued that "tohu" does not mean "unstructured" but "empty," and thus is a synonym for "bohu," "empty." Though there is evidence that might lead to this conclusion, it is trumped by the fact that in Genesis 1 there are three basic actions: lightening, forming, and filling, and these naturally related to the dark, "tohu," and "bohu" primordial conditions.]
This enables us to correlate the three zones of the earthly creation with the three problems and solutions:
Air Dark/Light
Water Unstructured/Structured
Earth Empty/Filled
We now have a heaven within the original earth. The fact that this firmament is called "heaven" means that it is an image of the original heaven. Being above the waters, it is in the same place as the light. As we observe the flow of events here, it seems pretty clear that the original glory-light of the first day is now expanded to form the firmament, a realm of light over the waters below. Later, the light of the firmament will be congealed into sun, moon, and stars, which give great light during the day and less light during the night.
The word "firmament" (raqia) is used for a beaten out, flat surface, like a shell or a tent over the earth. There is nothing mythological about this, for that is how the sky actually looks. A full examination of this place called the firmament, however, will show that it is also a chamber between heaven and earth. In Genesis 2, as we saw in an earlier essay, the Garden of Eden located between the higher ground of the Land of Eden and the lower ground of the world, is a replica of the firmament. Moreover, the chiastic structure of the seven days of creation establishes that man, made on the sixth day, is positioned in the firmament. Man is located between heaven and earth, under God but over the world. In that place, man worships God, and from that place he goes out to exercise dominion. The firmament chamber corresponds to the glory-cloud of God when it appears within the earthly cosmos, and to the Holy Place of the tabernacle and temple. Thus, the holy place contained a seven-lighted lampstand, positioned with the lights leading from the earth (courtyard) to the highest heavens (holy of holies), displaying the seven moving lights of the sky (in order: Moon, Venus, Mercury, Sun (central), Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn).
The firmament, considered as a shell, separates heaven and earth for the first time. There is now a barrier between them, and this points to eschatology, for it is implied that when the earth has fully matured the barrier will be removed. This barrier is replicated in the triple veils of the tabernacle and temple, which put a barrier between the symbolic heavens and earth, and which are removed at the crucifixion of Jesus — pointing to the complete removal of this barrier at the end of history.
Covenantally, we see God separating one thing (the sea) into two things, and then putting them into a new relation with one another. This act of separation happens whenever a covenant is made. In Genesis 2, God separates Eve from Adam, and marries them. In Genesis 15, God separates animals, representing Abram and the land as two estranged parties, which He then links by moving His Spirit between them. In the sacrifices, the animal is always cut into pieces, or else the blood is separated from the flesh.
Cosmically, the picture becomes a bit more complicated. From a phenomenological flat-earth perspective, we just have a sky above the earth, with heaven above it. We act in terms of this picture whenever we look up to God, lifting our faces toward the heavens.
In terms of the physical cosmos there are two aspects to discuss. First, the Bible is clear that heaven is now in another "dimension" from the earth. When heaven is opened, or when God appears, it always turns out to be very near, as in the vision of Isaiah 6. Thus, we cannot reach the highest heaven by means of a spaceship, as we might have on the first day before the firmament was established. The idea that the Biblical revelation is "unsophisticated" in this regard is unwarranted, as we have just seen. The ancient people were well aware that heaven was not physically or geographically located on the other side of the visible sky. They all knew that their gods’ heaven was "near" as well as "far away."
Additionally, there is now the firmament chamber, perhaps another "dimension" between heaven and earth. From later passages in the Bible, it seems that the departed saints resided here while they waited for heaven to be opened when the Man Jesus Christ would ascend to the throne of God and they would be allowed to accompany Him fully inside. The evacuation of that firmament chamber, as described in Revelation 6:9-11; 15:2 & 8; and 20:4, raises the possibility that it no longer exists today. God’s people no longer worship Him in a place between heaven and earth, but in Christ are now in heaven itself when they draw near to God. Recall that man, made on the sixth day, is symbolically positioned in the firmament at the beginning. Similarly, he is positioned in the Garden of Eden between Eden and the world. In Christ, however, we have moved up into heaven itself, into the Land of Eden. It would seem that the firmament, as a symbolic zone, and as the place of departed spirits, is gone.
At the same time, stars are "in" the firmament, while birds fly "in front of" it (vv. 14 & 20). In this sense, the firmament is outer space, the matrix of light. Cosmologically, the firmament is the place where the stars will be put in two days. We shall defer further comments on the cosmological aspect of the matter until we get to the fourth day.
The waters above the firmament are in heaven itself, on the far side of the firmament. They are not clouds, nor are they a water-vapor canopy over the earth. If such a canopy existed, the Bible does not speak about it; such theories must be grounded in other lines of evidence and argument. The waters below the firmament include the clouds, which recycle the waters below, continually baptizing and cleansing the earth through rain.
God reached down into the earth and took some of the water up into heaven. This is an eschatological picture. It differentiates not only between lower and upper waters, but between first and last waters. The first waters covering the earth were an initial baptism, while being sprinkled with waters from above is the sign of our final baptism. We begin on earth, with earthly waters; we enter the final kingdom of God by passing through heavenly waters. Agreeable to this, the laver of cleansing in the tabernacle and the great sea and laver-chariots of the Temple were all mounted on pedestals, and thus represented the waters above. The sea of glass, crystal, ice that is seen in visions of heaven in Ezekiel and Revelation is the water taken into heaven on the second day.
Psalm 104:2b-4 comments on the second day as follows. We are told that God stretched out the firmament heaven like a curtain. Then we are told that God’s upper chambers (His palace) is built upon the waters above the firmament. Then the psalmist refers to clouds and the wind, and to fire. It seems that the firmament can be considered as including these lower phenomena in the atmosphere, though possibly "fire" here refers to the lights in the sky (in outer space).
(to be continued)
OPEN BOOK, Views & Reviews, No. 36
Copyright (c) 1997 Biblical Horizons
October, 1997
Part 1: Introduction
The collapse of the Western tradition in the United States, seen in the hostility to Christianity in government and education, and the elimination of "traditional" or "canon" learning from our institutions of middle and higher learning, provides a crisis and an opportunity for serious believers at the beginning of the third millennium. These essays are an invitation to think squarely and forthrightly about what the Christian agenda should be. I am taking up from two previously published essays. The first is my booklet, Crisis, Opportunity, and the Christian Future, published by Transfiguration Press and available from Biblical Horizons for $3.50. The second is the essay, "The Great Hangover," published in Biblical Horizons Nos. 74 & 75, available for $2.00 from Biblical Horizons .
I submit that to far too great a degree, Bible-believing Christians are allowing Roman Catholics and secular conservatives to do their thinking for them. Both of these groups advocate a return to the synthetic culture called "Western Civilization," an unholy (and unstable) mixture of Greco-Roman paganism and Biblical religion. Many writers in these groups are brilliant and sometimes have penetrating insights, but this does not change the fact that what they advocate is basically a mixture of Baal and Christ. The so-called "canon" of Western literature is such a mixture, often including far more non-Christian work than Christian work. The situation as regards political philosophy in Western Civilization is, if anything, worse.
Because Bible Christians are often not highly educated, and often are rather easily intimidated, they find themselves drawn to conservative writers and thinkers. A few years ago, for instance, the work of a secular conservative, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, was all the rage in evangelical Christendom. There was virtually no critical interaction with this book.
The lack of a strong intellectual presence among Bible Christians in America has meant that the game has gone to Roman Catholic thinkers, and their fellow-travellers, by default: William Buckley, John Neuhaus, and Russell Kirk, for instance; and such publications as First Things, Chronicles, and Modern Age. These man and the many others like them have much good to say, but essentially they want to turn back the clock to a situation where pagan and Christian thinking is merged into the "Western" synthesis. To be sure, they tend to read the pagan Greeks and Romans through Christian eyes, creating imaginary Platos and Ciceros who did not ever really exist. But also, they do not take a high view of the Scripture, especially of the societal directives God spoke to Israel at Mount Sinai, and thus are much influenced by pagan ways, often without realizing it.
As mentioned above, Western Civilization is over. That is to say, the tradition of that civilization has been broken now by two generations of ignorance and apostasy, extending from the "Sixties" to today. Therefore, the question before us as Bible Christians is this: Do we strive to restore that tradition, or should we look to the Bible and strive to create something better?
I imagine most Bible Christians would answer that we should strive to create something better. Yet, as I myself look at the Church, the Christian education movement, and the world of Christian commentary today, I come to the conclusion that a good deal of deeper reflection is needed on this issue. Many Christian schools, for instance, now advertise that they offer "classical Christian education." Does that mean "old-fashioned Christian education"? (which might be a problem in itself). Or does it mean "a combination of the best of the Bible with the best of the classical Greeks and Romans," which is much more of a problem? Are these schools teaching Latin or Hebrew as a foundational tool for life? Is the school day organized liturgically around the psalter, and is music given as much prominence as language and literature?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, and in a sense I cannot know them. For one thing, all these schools are different, with different people involved in them. For another, such leaders as there are in this "classical Christian education" movement are certainly learning as they go, so what they advocated five years ago might be under revision today. My purpose in bringing the matter up is not to criticize these earnest Christian educators; far from it. They are probably doing among the best work in Christian education that is being done. Rather, I bring them up simply as a way to illustrate the overall concern of these essays. Perhaps some of those involved in the endeavor of Christian education will read these essays and be stimulated by them, as we all strive to lay a more solid foundation for future generations.
Moreover, I don’t believe that it is possible to restore the tradition we call "Western Civilization." The attempt to do so is a waste of time and effort, tilting at windmills. As I pointed out in Through New Eyes, chapter 3, cultures are symbolic structures made up of a worldview (symbolizing the world a certain way) operating in a tradition. Once that tradition is gone, the culture cannot be put back together. Cultures are not like stones in a wall, which if it crumbles can be rebuilt. Rather, cultures are like Humpty Dumpty. When an egg and its yoke are broken, then all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put it back together again. When a culture is gone — and ours is — the only valid possibility for the future is to lay the foundations for a new culture. Within the history of a culture, a Josiah can rebuild it; but when a culture is gone, new Abrahams are needed. When things fall apart, and the center can no longer hold, we must be Abrahams. Otherwise the rough beast will take over Bethlehem.
Well then, just what is "Western Civilization"? The term was apparently coined originally by G. K. Chesterton, himself a very insightful Roman Catholic thinker, around a century ago. It is as a culture declines that it begins to have names for itself, for it sees itself as already "in the past," and thus objectifiable. I don’t know for certain what Chesterton meant by the term, but generally speaking, Western Civilization is a culture that grew up out of the classical world of Greece and Rome under the influence of the Bible. It is mostly a mixture of these two sources. At various times, one or the other has been predominant.
Now, what I have just written is a very general characterization. A very brief summary of the history of that civilization will show some of the ins and outs. Let us begin with the Apostolic Era itself, the time when the so-called "New Testament" was written. There have been those who have tried to argue that the thinking of the apostles was a Divinely-authorized synthesis of the so-called "Old Testament" with the best of pagan thinking. This is, frankly, rather easily demonstrable nonsense, but it crops up from time to time, so we can address it here. Supposedly, there is a new, more "inner" and more "otherworldly" kind of ethics and spirituality in the NT writings, over against the more "outer" and "this-worldly" thinking found in the OT. Now, nobody familiar with the Psalter and with Ecclesiastes would ever imagine such a thing. The so-called OT is every bit as "inner" and "otherworldly" as the so-called NT. And if we pay attention to what Paul and Jesus, etc., were saying, their message was every bit as "outer" and "this-worldly" as that of Moses and the prophets.
Or, supposedly the NT Greek word for "Church," ekklesia, alludes back to the Greek city-state of five hundred years earlier. Gimmeabreak, woudja? The NT usage of the word ekklesia is completely and thoroughly grounded in the OT words for the organized assembly of God, grounded in concepts current in Israel from the beginning and actively present in the Jewish culture at the time the NT was written. It has nothing to do with how Greeks in another civilization had used the word five centuries earlier, except as the term coincidentally connotes many of the same concepts (a gathered people organized as a government). As regards ekklesia, the only thing that flowed from Greek civilization to the Jews was the sound of the word and its general applicability; the content came from the Bible and from the Israelite traditions. (For a full discussion, see my book The Sociology of the Church, photocopy available from Biblical Horizons for $10.00.)
All one might credibly argue is that certain philosophers and religious traditions in Greece had prepared the way for the Greeks to receive the Biblical revelation, so that many similar concepts are found among these Greeks. To argue this way, however, is to radically misunderstand both the Greeks and the Bible, as we shall see.
The early post-Apostolic Church was engaged in spiritual warfare with the Greco-Roman civilization, and was not interested in forming any kind of synthesis with it. Even in this time, however, many of the leading thinkers of Christianity were adult converts from philosophy, and they brought with them a great deal of pagan baggage. With the conversion of Constantine and the recognition of Christianity as true religion, things changed. Many people came into the orbit of the Church who were only scantily discipled, and with them came a host of pagan concepts and practices.
Meanwhile, as Christianity moved into the tribal cultures of Northern Europe, it was the Bible and not a Greco-Bible synthesis that took hold. Early European Christianity, during the troubled times called "dark ages," sought to ground its social and political thinking directly on the Bible, without the "benefit" of Roman law and Greek philosophy. The result was great social progress (especially considering the barbarism of the tribes when they were initially converted).
As time went along, however, the Church became "rigid, corrupt, and obtuse," to quote Page Smith. In the 1400s, we find a revival of interest in Greek civilization, a result of a new communication between Rome and Constantinople. Smith writes "concerning the newest intellectual fad — Greek thought and culture. The result was what came to be called Christian Humanism, a movement that sought to elevate man, the noblest work of the Almighty. One consequence was the inevitable diminishment of God. An infatuation with things Greek soon became a weapon against the stifling authority of the Church. If one considered the matter to a degree objectively, it was a most curious development . . . . The moment of high Greek, or, more accurately, Athenian culture, was as brief as it was brilliant. It lasted roughly fifty years. It changed nothing in the manner of men’s and women’s lives. I think it is safe to say that much as it enhanced the artistic and intellectual life of the race [which I question — JBJ], the world would be much the same today without it. The actual lives of the Greeks were as far from the ideal image of, say, Plato’s Republic (which was, in fact, a rigid dictatorship) as one could well imagine. The history of the Greek city-states is a history, in the main, of continual external wars and internal chaos.
"Moreover, the Greeks were an intensely proud and exclusive people, contemptuous of the barbarian (as they put it) cultures around them. What the obsession with Classical, and particularly with Greek, culture meant was that (using St. Augustine’s system) the city of man found a religion opposed to that of the city of God. That philosophy represented, to be sure, a substantial misreading of Greek thought. By a process of transmutation, the often wildly irrational Greeks were put forward as the exemplars of rationality, science, and reason."
[Page Smith, Rediscovering Christianity: A History of Modern Democracy and the Christian Ethic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 32-34. Smith is regarded by many as the "dean of American historians." This book of his is a curious mixture of good Christian ideas and extremely bad economics.]
Although the Greeks and their ideas came out in the open as opponents of Christianity during the Renaissance, Greek and Roman ideas had come to influence Western Christendom earlier. All along, the European tribes had admired Rome, and even as they used the Bible as their fundamental law, they also wanted to be "Roman," thus calling themselves the "Holy Roman Empire." In the high "Middle Ages," the philosopher Aristotle came into influence in Western Christendom as a result of contact with Arabic civilization, where Aristotle had experienced an earlier revival. And, sadly, many Western theologians had all along perpetuated the Platonic ideas found in the writings of early Church mystics like Pseudo-Dionysius.
The rediscovery of Greece and Rome and the rise of modern paganism resulted in the growth of statist absolutism in Europe, which was briefly countered by the Reformation. The Reformation, however, did not make a complete break with classicism, as it should have. Roman stoic ideas of virtue and law found their way into almost every Reformer’s and post-Reformer’s writings (except Luther’s, who boisterously rejected everything pagan). Later on, the Puritans, who sought in so many ways to be consistent with the Bible, continued to educate their children in Latin and in Greek and Roman authors. Their grandchildren became Unitarians. No surprise.
(See two essays by Peter Leithart available from Biblical Horizons : "Stoic Elements in Calvin’s Doctrine of the Christian Life," and "That Eminent Pagan: Calvin’s Use of Cicero in Institutes 1.1-5." See also, if you can find it, Rousas J. Rushdoony, The Flight From Humanity.)
All along, of course, the Bible had its leavening influence, but generally not at the top. People educated in the Bible as children often became liberals once they read the "classics." Education and government remained heavily influenced by paganism.
(If you can find them, two excellent studies of the history of Christianity in Western Civilization are by Rousas J. Rushdoony: The One and the Many and World History Notes. Each of these has been published more than once. I no longer know how to obtain copies.)
With this brief background, let us now consider some factors in culture and civilization, as we attempt to do better than our forefathers.
OPEN BOOK, Views & Reviews, No. 35
Copyright (c) 1997 Biblical Horizons
October, 1997
Two books on the "Bible Code" have appeared this year. The first, a current bestseller, is Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code (Drosnin, 1997). The other is Cracking the Bible Code (William Morrow, 1997), by Jeffrey Satinover, known to Christians for his outstanding 1996 book Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth (Baker, 1996). In this earlier work, Satinover gives evidence of a conversion to Christianity from his earlier Judaism, but in Cracking the Bible Code this is not at all apparent.
Basically, the mooted Bible Code is this: It is asserted that in the five books of the Torah we find all kinds of information hidden in the sequences of letters in the Hebrew text. That is, if we start at some random place and skip to every 6th or 15th letter (for instance) we find a hidden word. This procedure can be done either forwards (in Hebrew, from right to left) or backward (left to right). Since neither punctuation nor spaces between letters were present in the original text, these are not taken into consideration.
Now, by itself this is not strange. Any text will show such phenomena. All you have to do is program a computer to find such hidden words. Bible Code advocates, however, add the following criteria. (1) A word may appear many times in a given passage, indicating Divine placement. (2) Or, two or more related words may appear in a given passage. (3) Or, the hidden words in a passage relate strongly to the theme or message of that same passage.
The argument goes that these hidden messages from God appear only in the original five books of the Torah, which we are told were dictated by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, letter by letter. The rest of the Hebrew scriptures do not, we are told, display this phenomenon. All of this is offered as a mathematical proof for the Divine origin of the first five books of the Bible.
Satinover’s book is a history of the development of the decrypting methods used by rabbis to uncover these codes, and a description of the present computerized state of the endeavor. It is a more sober account than Drosnin’s. Several aspects of the endeavor, however, should cause serious Christians to avoid being caught up in the present currents of excitement and enthusiasm about this matter.
(1). The notion that God dictated the first five books to Moses is nonsense. Nowhere does the Bible tell us that Moses wrote Genesis, though it is commonly held that he did. (I personally favor the view that Genesis was written or compiled by Joseph, and was the Bible for the Hebrews while they were in Egypt.) Nowhere does the Bible tell us that God dictated to Moses anything more than what it explicitly says He dictated to him; to wit, most of the second half of Exodus, almost all of Leviticus, and portions of Numbers. The rest was written by Moses under Divine inspiration, not by dictation. Moreover, the dictation came as God spoke statements and Moses wrote them down, not letter by letter. Deuteronomy is presented as a sermon written by Moses almost forty years after Mount Sinai. Thus, the rabbinical tradition that God dictated all five books of the original Torah letter by letter is completely false.
(2). The reason it is easy to find hidden words in Hebrew is that almost all Hebrew words consist of three or four letters. That is because Hebrew vowels are not written. If you search any text in any language for three-letter words hidden at various spacings, you will find loads of them — especially if you can move backwards as well as forwards, and even more especially if you can ignore vowels. This obvious fact does not seem to have occurred to the advocates of Bible Code.
(3). Bible Code enthusiasts claim that various historical events and scientific discoveries are hidden in the original Torah, such as the treatment for diabetes (Satinover, p. 163). (!) To be sure, in a text this large one can find a dozen or so interesting items along this line, but what of the literally billions of historical and scientific facts that are not found there? I don’t doubt but that one could find a couple of historical and scientific "predictions" in Shakespeare’s Hamlet if one were to program a computer to find them.
An exercise along these lines is found in the November/December 1997 issue of Skeptical Inquirer (vol. 21, no. 6): "Hidden Messages and the Bible Code," by David E. Thomas (pp. 30-36). (Though published by atheists, Skeptical Inquirer and similar magazines are useful tools for Christians dealing with modern idiocies.) Thomas looks at several secular texts and finds hidden words in them. He finds the two words "Hitler" and "Nazi" together in three short passages: in Genesis 8-11; in a short section of the 1987 Supreme Court ruling Edwards v. Aguillard (a Creation Science case); and in Tolstoi’s War and Peace (in English; five paragraphs from Book 1, Chapter 2). He also finds the pair "Roswell" — "UFO" three different places in the AV of Genesis; for instance:
… me to kiss my sons and my daUgh-teRs? thOu haSt noWdonEfooLishLy in so doing. It is in the power of my hand to do you hurt: but the God of your Father spake unto me yesternight, saying, `Take thou heed that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad.’ And nOw, though thou wouldest needs be gone… (Genesis 31:28-30).
("UFO" is spaced 88 letters apart. As with Bible Code, spacings and punctuation don’t count.)
(4). The only aspect of this research that may have some validity is when a given word occurs several times encoded in a short passage that has a theme closely related to that word; or where a set of words is encoded that relate to that theme. Satinover does not provide many examples, and so perhaps these are only coincidences. Time and future research will tell.
For instance, though, Genesis 1:29–2:17 is a section that begins and ends with God’s provision of edible grains and trees for Adam and Eve to eat from. Encoded in this short section are the following seven Hebrew words: barley, wheat, vine, date, olive, fig, and pomegranate (Satinover, p. 145). On the face of it, this is quite remarkable.
Similarly, Genesis 2:7–3:3, which begins with the creation of Adam and ends with Eve’s affirmation concerning the prohibition of the Tree of Knowledge and includes the planting of the garden, contains encoded 25 plants, mostly trees: chestnut, thicket, date palm, acacia, boxthorn, cedar, pistachio, fig, willow, pomegranate, aloe, tamarisk, oak, poplar, cassia, almond, terebinth, thornbush, hazel, olive, citron, gopherwood, wheat, vine, and grape (Satinover, p. 146).
Satinover also points out (p. 123) that "Eden" appears encoded nineteen times in Genesis 2:4-17 and "the river" thirteen times in the same passage — both very important themes in the actual text.
Now, this kind of encoded information, if it be really present, does not add anything new to our understanding of the text. It simply adds another literary dimension to it. Similarly, as Umberto Cassuto points out in his commentary on Exodus: In Exodus 1:8-14, the words for labor and rigor occur a total of seven time; in 1:15-22, the word "midwives" occurs seven times; and in Exodus 2:1-10, the word "child" occurs seven times. This kind of numerological patterning does not alter our understanding of the text itself, but does add another layer of wonder to our appreciation of it. Just so, it might turn out that the kinds of encoded information we are discussing at this point are really present in many texts. We should expect, however, more than just a few instances, and we should also expect them to occur throughout the Word of God, not just in the first five books thereof.
Bible Code, we must say, is just another form of Qabbalism, this time with computers. In the main, it is a deceptive abuse of the Word of God, and should be scorned by Christians. The fact that so many people are ready to believe such a thing, based as it is on such faulty reasoning and so few facts, only shows once again that when people won’t believe in the true God, they will believe anything.
