BIBLICAL Horizons, No. 107
Copyright (c) 1998 Biblical Horizons
July, 1998
The following essay is tentative and exploratory, offered for your consideration.
It seems to me that the ritual of the Ascension Offering (incorrectly translated as Burnt Offering) of Leviticus 1 is a symbolic recapitulation of Genesis 1, which thereby portrays the sacrificial ritual as way of moving from a fallen to a new creation. If this notion prove correct, it will shed considerable light on all the sacrificial rituals, as well as on the work of Jesus Christ, whose death made the New Creation possible.
Day 1; Leviticus 1:4. God makes the world, which is formless, empty, and dark. The Spirit comes into the world, bringing light. I suggest that the sacrificial animal, made of earth (Genesis 1:24), not only represents man (made of earth), but also the cosmos of which man is the self-conscious aspect and representative. It appears to me that when the offerer lays his hand on the animal, this parallels the Spirit coming into the creation to work with it.
Day 2; Leviticus 1:5a. God puts a firmament between waters that are above it (in heaven) and waters below it (on the earth). The animal is slain. The animal, appointed as a covering (v. 4, mistranslated as "atonement"), becomes a firmament between God and man, covering man’s sins from God’s eyes. The killing of the animal creates the covering. It is only a death for sin that covers us in God’s eyes, placing a good firmament cover over us.
Day 3; Leviticus 1:5b-6. God creates dry land, the highest point of which is the Holy Mountain, which the altar symbolizes. Blood is dashed against the side of the altar, and dribbles down to its base, as the waters ran off the earth in Day 3 and at the Flood. Then the animal is skinned and cut into pieces. Now, on the second half of Day 3, God created fruit trees and grain plants, the foundations of wine and bread. These two parallel the blood and flesh of the animal, just as in the Lord’s Supper, bread and wine parallel the body and blood of Jesus. Later in Leviticus, God will discuss defilements of the flesh (chapters 11-16), and abominations of the blood (chapters 17-22). Thus, it appears to me that converting the animal into flesh and blood parallels making bread and wine plants on Day 3.
Day 4; Leviticus 1:7. God establishes His hearthfires on the firmament over the earth: sun, moon, and stars. The priests put the holy fire, which came from heaven (Leviticus 9:24) on the altar.
Day 5; Leviticus 1:8. The head and fat, the clean outer and inner parts of the animal, are placed on the fire and turned into smoke as food for God. As seems always to be the case, the link of the fifth element in a seven-fold sequence with Day 5 is problematic. I don’t see any way that head and fat correspond to birds and fishes! So I shall simply have to set this aside for now.
Day 6; Leviticus 1:9a. Animals and men are made from earth. The guts and legs, the unclean inner and outer parts, are baptized and then offered. These represent most fully the offerer, restored by baptism, and thus correspond to the creation of Adam and Eve on Day 6.
Day 7; Leviticus 1:9b. Sabbath. The offering ascends as food, as a soothing (restful) aroma to Yahweh.
Now, these are just preliminary observations. The seven-day pattern of Genesis 1 is recapitulated in Genesis 2, 3, & 4, and in Genesis as a whole, and numerous times in the instructions for the Tabernacle. All of these are background for Leviticus 1. Thus, if my initial thesis is correct, these other creational recapitulations will shed further light on Leviticus 1, providing refinements and new insights.
BIBLICAL Horizons, No. 107
Copyright (c) 1998 Biblical Horizons
July, 1998
Just as the vast majority of evangelical Christians in America today are Arminian and Baptist, so the vast majority do not believe in a creation around 4000 BC. I don’t expect any of these three situations to change anytime soon. Powerful presuppositions are at work in all three instances, along with what I can only honestly call intellectual sloppiness. It is certainly not the case that my own work is the finest example of intellectual precision, but in the case of the various published heilsgeschichte ("holy story") interpretations of Genesis 1, the sloppiness is pretty evident.
To cut it down to the most basic: It is clear that Genesis 1 narrates the creation of the world in six quite ordinary days, each day having a quite ordinary evening and morning, the days following one another to form a week. It is also clear that Genesis 5 and 11 form a chronology from creation to Abram. That’s the prima facie obvious reading of the text, and so the text was read by the Jews and by Christians for 1800 years.
On what grounds do men reject the historicity of Genesis 1? One can assert simply that we now know that the world is older than 4000 years, and that the universe did not come into existence in six days; and then on the basis of such assumptions reinterpret Genesis 1. It is to the credit of most evangelical and Reformed expositors that such an argument is not satisfactory. The only possible Biblical argument for taking Genesis 1 in some other way must arise from the text itself, or other places in the Bible that rather clearly indicate that Genesis 1 is not to be taken as an historical account.
Thus, it is asserted that there are indications in Genesis 1 itself that the passage is not to be taken "literally," indications overlooked by previous generations because they were not giving full attention to the text. The asseverations of "modern science" have forced us to look at the text anew, and now we find contradictions in the text that indicate that it is not to be taken as an historical account.
We can summarize these evidences of ahistoricality as follows. First, it is said that the creation of light on the first day contradicts the creation of the sun on the fourth. This argument is frankly ridiculous, since the Bible everywhere presents the Shekinah light of God as the archetype of which the sun is but a copy. Clearly, the light that was "let be" on the first day was the light of the Spirit. There is absolutely no Biblical ground for asserting a conflict between day 1 and day 4.
Second, it is said that all the plants were made on the third day, while at the time Adam was created there were still plants to be made. Once again, this contradiction is pure illusion. Genesis 1 very carefully states only that grain plants and fruiting trees were made on the third day. Genesis 2:5 states that at the time Adam was created certain other plants had not yet been created, and that the grain plants had not yet sprouted ears of grain. There is no contradiction in the text; only in the imaginations of certain expositors.
Third, it is said that the sixth day involves too much activity for one mere day. This is preposterous and hardly worthy of attention. All the events could easily have been finished by noon.
Fourth, it is said that the sabbath day is unending. Well, clearly it both ended in one sense and did not end in another. In any event, this has nothing to do with the lengths and character of the other days, which are specified as having mornings and evenings.
Finally, it is asserted that the firmament of the second day must be a hard shell over the earth, which we now know does not exist, and thus must be symbolic. This assertion ignores the facts (a) that a firmament in Hebrew is not always a hard shell, and (b) that the Bible often speaks of the firmament as a chamber as well as a layer, which comports perfectly with the statement that on day 4 God placed the sun, moon, planets, and stars within the firmament chamber. While some ancient people believed that the stars were fixed on a hard shell, they knew full well that the sun, moon, and planets were not, because of their independent movement. They knew, in other words, that the firmament had depth.
These five asserted problems in Genesis 1 are then supplemented by observations on the literary structure of the passage, as if literary structure were somehow in conflict with historicity — an assumption so preposterous that it is never baldly stated.
In conclusion, the supposed indications that Genesis 1 is not to be taken historically prove on scant inspection to be chimaeras.
But what difference does it really make? I submit that the entire Christian faith stands or falls on how Genesis 1 is interpreted, and that the guardians of the Church must take an unequivocal stance on this matter.
The issue is hermeneutics and religion. Since these "contradictions" in Genesis 1 serve to indicate that this passage is not to be taken historically, the only alternative is to take the passage as giving some kind of archetype for creation by God. It is a foundational "myth," expressing in "human language" matters that cannot be expressed any other way. It is a true myth in that the ideas taught in Genesis 1 are true.
And this is where the shift from true religion to gnosticism comes in. History has been replaced by ideas.
Now, with the arbitrariness of a man selecting a meal from a smorgasbord, evangelicals who reject the historicity of Genesis 1 insist on the historicity of later passages in the Bible. In this happy inconsistency they rest, never inspecting their intellectual sloppiness.
But let us turn to two other seemingly historical events in the Bible and apply the hermeneutical principles of these gnosticizing brethren. The first to which we turn is the ten plagues visited on Egypt.
First of all, we note that 20th century historians of the ancient world cannot find any evidence of a vast host of people leaving Egypt at the time the Bible says it happened. Moreover, according to the text of Exodus, all the Egyptian crops and cattle were destroyed, along with the Egyptian army and a large number of Egypt’s sons. Modern "scientific" archaeology and history finds no such event. Therefore, we have to look at the text of Exodus anew. Maybe these events never really happened. Maybe they are just a "true myth," providing archetypical "ideas" that undergirded God’s relationship with Israel.
Well, do we find any indications in the text that the ten plagues are only a story, that they never really happened? Yes, we do, it seems. According to Exodus 9:6, all the livestock of Egypt died in the fifth plague, but according to 9:19, there were still more livestock to be killed in the seventh plague. Also, according to Exodus 8:22, the insects destroyed all of Egypt, clearly including the plants, while in 9:31, the flax and barley were destroyed later on in the seventh plague, and then in 10:15, the locusts ate all the remaining plants. These are much clearer "contradictions" than anything found in Genesis 1. And to these we may add that repeatedly Pharaoh says he will let the people go, and then changes his mind. How likely is this?
Well, since we have found such clear indications that these plagues are not to be taken as real history, do we find a literary framework to posit as some kind of alternative? Certainly. There are three groups of three plagues, and then a tenth. The first plague in each cycle begins with a command to go to Pharaoh in the morning. The second in each cycle begins with a command simply to go to Pharaoh. The third in each cycle is not announced to Pharaoh at all. The first three plagues are brought by Aaron’s staff, while the last three are brought by Moses’ hand. And so forth. So, we have a clear literary structure.
Of course, traditional expositors have suggested ways around the "contradictions" in the historical narrative of the ten plagues, but if we are going to let the interpretation of Genesis 1 be our guide, we may not try to get around these "contradictions." Rather, we must let them be indicators that these events never really happened. The plagues on Egypt were not historical events, but are a foundational and archetypal myth for the nation of Israel, just as the six days of Genesis are a foundational and archetypal myth for the whole universe.
Now let us turn to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Repeating our Genesis 1 procedure, we note first of all that "scientific" historians can find no evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. Josephus says nothing about it, and neither does any other "unbiased" source. So, maybe it never happened. We must inspect the text anew.
Do we find contradictions that indicate that the resurrection never happened? Of course we do! The four gospels are in obvious conflict with one other regarding the events of Easter morning. Of course, traditional expositors try to harmonize these four accounts, as John Wenham does in his book Easter Enigma: Are the Resurrection Accounts in Conflict? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984; highly recommended). But no, we should let the contradictions stand as they are, for they indicate to us that we are not dealing with what we think of as history at all.
So, seeing that there are contradictions in the text, do we find literary structures that indicate the real meaning of the text? Certainly. In John, for instance, Jesus’ tomb is presented as a holy of holies with the slab on which He lay as an Ark-cover ith two angels at either end. Moreover, Jesus appears as Gardener in a new Edenic garden in John. Thus, John is giving us theology, ideas, not history.
And here my essay concludes. If we approach the Bible the way the ahistorical interpreters of Genesis 1 want us to, the Christian religion disappears into gnosticism. By the same token, if we take other passages of the Bible in their obvious historical sense, and resolve seeming contradictions in the way the Church has always done, then we must do the same with Genesis 1.
The "framework hypothesis" and its brethren import to the Bible a hermeneutics completely alien to the Christian religion. Our faith is based in facts, historical facts: the acts of God in history, in creation, redemption, and new-creation. The faith of the gnostic is in ideas about eternal matters.
Our conclusion is that these modern approaches to Genesis 1 are simply heretical. Not that those advocating them are heretics, for they sloppily and with happy inconsistency retain most of the Christian religion. But if their hermeneutical procedure is allowed standing within the Church, their disciples will in time carry forth their heresy consistently, and the faith will be lost. Thus it has ever been.
For this reason, no one advocating such views should ever be ordained to the ministry or be allowed to teach in theological seminaries. I don’t expect many Presbyterians to understand this, any more than I expect Baptists to stop being Baptists or Arminians to cease being Arminians. But just as the Baptist and Arminian forms of Christianity have no future, being fundamentally flawed, so evangelicalism and Presbyterianism have no future because of their toleration of this fundamental hermeneutical rot. They have corrupted the very foundation and beginning of the Bible, and the rest will follow in due course.
Rite Reasons, Studies in Worship, No. 58
Copyright (c) 1998 Biblical Horizons
July, 1998
The Iconoclastic Controversy
Continuing Pagan Influence
How did images creep in? To begin with, there was in the post-Constantinian Church a concerted effort on the part of the semi-pagans to interpret Christianity in essentially pantheistic terms. The heretics put God and man on a continuum of "being," so that God was conceived as a "thing," a "substance," and the saint was someone who merged with God-stuff better than others did. The emperor, being God’s select man, the new David, had more of this God-stuff than other people by virtue of his calling and office. This mystical and pantheistic philosophical notion was at the root of most if not all the heresies that cropped up in the Church.4 The emperors tended to favor the heretics, because they celebrated him as semi-divine.5
4For a full and illuminating discussion, see Rousas John Rushdoony, The Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed Pub. Co., 1968). 5Ibid., passim. See also, on the liturgies surrounding the emperor, Sabine G. MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California, 1981).
At the same time, as we have noted, the post-Constantinian Roman Empire was officially tolerant of Christianity, and then officially Christian. It is not the case that the majority of people became Christians rapidly, and we find complaints against pagan religions for centuries after Constantine, along with occasional persecutions of non-Christians. Over time, however, the pagans became officially Christians. They brought with them, however, numerous pagan ideas and practices, which the Church’s leaders simultaneously tolerated and worked against.6
6For a history that may need some revision, see nevertheless Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale, 1997).
Primary among these practices was the cult of the saints, of the dead. The Bible knows of no such cultus, but Christianity developed celebrations of martyrs, and those celebrations did not at all have the same character as the official liturgies of Lord’s Day worship. Rather, these celebrations drew heavily upon similar pagan celebrations of the dead. It was through this "back door" that all kinds of pagan conceptions became woven into the semi-Christianity of the masses.7
7See Ibid., passim. Also, on some of the subtle differences between Christian and pagan celebrations of the dead, see Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (University of Chicago, 1981).
At this point I wish to summarize at length an essay by Peter Brown dealing with the background of the Iconoclastic Controversy.8 As I have pointed out already, the Bible absolutely forbids any veneration of man-made objects, consecrated or otherwise. The New Testament writings reveal no change in this absolute "No!" The early Church did not venerate the sacraments or church buildings or the cross (which evidently they did not use as a symbol at all).
8"A Dark Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic Controversy," English Historical Review 88 (1973):1-34; reprinted in Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California, 1982), pp. 251-301.
Pagan Holiness
By the time of the Iconoclastic Controversy of the mid-700s, however, the Church had fallen into a serious violation of God’s law. They had redefined the notion of "holy." In the Bible, holy things and holy people are holy because they are separated to and linked with (married to) God, who is holy. A saint, or "holy one," is someone given access to God’s particular presence in His sanctuary. The holy things of the Old Creation all symbolized God’s people in various capacities gathered around Him, and in the New Creation that symbolism fell away as the reality came fully into being. Now it was the people themselves who, as Bride, had access to the Most Holy (as the letter to the Hebrews insists), so that the pots and pans and altars and veils that represented their presence were no longer needed.
By the 700s, however, the Church had lost this conception of holiness. They had substituted the notion that some kind of force or "blessing" from God made things and persons holy. Some kind of God-stuff, or something like God-stuff, was infused into objects, thereby rendering them "holy." This went beyond the Bible, for in the Bible the waters of baptism make people officially holy, and gives them access to the Lord’s presence at His Table. But Holy Baptism is not an infusion of anything, but rather is a marriage ceremony that confirms a personal relationship between God and the believer, a relationship based in conversation (Word, prayer, psalter), not based in some kind of non-verbal mysticism.
Now, the Iconoclasts (anti-icon party) and the Iconodules (pro-icon party) disagreed over what items had this "holiness" imparted to or infused in them. Brown writes, "On the issue of what was holy and what was not the Iconoclasts were firm and unambiguous. Certain material objects were holy because they had been solemnly blessed by ordained priests. . . . For the Iconoclasts, there were only three such objects: the Eucharist, which was both given by Christ and consecrated by the clergy; the church building, which was consecrated by the bishop; [and] the sign of the cross . . . . [which] was a sign given directly by God to men, whien it first appeared in the sky to the Emperor Constantine" (Society and the Holy, p. 258). Thus, "icons could not be holy because they had received no consecration from above" (p. 259).
Now, "the Iconodules could not claim that an icon produced by an artisan was holy because it had been blessed in the same solemn manner as had the Eucharistic bread or the basilica" (p. 261). "The consecration of icons is a later development" (p. 261, n. 42). Thus, the Iconodules had to formulate other theories to justify the icons. Some icons, they insisted, were given immediately by God, dropped from heaven as it were. "Other icons that did not enjoy the privileges of a direct other-worldly origin nevertheless enjoyed a consecration from the past" (p. 262). Iconodules dreamed up the idea that St. Luke had not only written a gospel, but had painted the Virgin from life, and had painted various illustrations of scenes from the life of Christ just as they had occurred.
Brown summarizes this contrast by noting that "Iconoclasm, therefore, is a centripetal reaction: It asserts the unique value of a few central symbols of the Christianity community that enjoyed consecration from above against the centrifugal tendencies of the piety that had spread the charge of the holy on to a multiplicity of unconsecrated objects" (p. 263). In other words, the semi-Christian masses wanted all kinds of charmed "holy" objects near at hand, which they could "use" apart from the liturgy, while the educated clergy were still trying to draw these semi-Christian masses toward a more Biblical, though still flawed, conception of reality.
While icons were used all over the Mediterranean by this time, they had not found their way into the church and the liturgy. "Some of the greatest shrines of the Byzantine period, most notably the Hagia Sophia itself [the great church in Constantinople], would have struck any eighth-century worshipper as almost entirely an-iconic" (p. 265).
Imperial Icons
Now Brown discusses the development of the veneration of icons as it moved toward inclusion in the Church, building on an essay by E. Kitzinger, "The Cult of Images in the Age Before Iconoclasm," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8(1954):83-149. Brown writes: "A tendency to worship the individual icon had always existed among Mediterranean people. Up to the sixth century, however, the elite of the Christian Church had offered a constant resistance to `the naive, animistic ideas of the masses’ (Kitzinger, p. 146). In the late sixth century, `the resistance to such pressure on the part of the authorities decreased . . . and this relaxation of counter pressure from above was at least a major factor in the development’ (Kitzinger, p. 119). It was the imperial court rather than the bishops who were responsible for this change. For Kitzinger emphasizes that one privileged oasis of religious feeling for an image had survived intact since pagan times — the veneration of imperial images. Religious images began to receive marks of veneration analogous to the imperial images in the sixth century or even earlier; but, at the end of the sixth century, the emperors, in Kitzinger’s opinion, took the final conscious step in fostering these practices. They allowed icons of Christ and of the Virgin to stand in the place of the imperial images, and so to receive the same frankly pagan worship as their own images had always received. By the seventh century, such icons were firmly established as part of the public cultus of the Byzantine Empire" (pp. 265f.)
Thus, one part of the situation that led to the worship of icons was the introduction of Christian pictures into the pagan ceremonies of the semi-Christian Emperors. Icons received a protected and official veneration at imperial shrines, though they were still disapproved for use in the Church.
The Holy Man
There was another factor, however, and here we return to the cult of the dead. Brown tells us that we need to understand how the "holy man" was viewed in popular semi-Christian piety, and with the unfortunate blessing of the Church. "From the fourth century onwards, the holy man was a living icon. To the theologian he was man at its height, man as first made `in the image of God.’ One of the three hermits who used to visit St. Anthony came every year and sat there while the others talked, without saying a word: `It is sufficient for me, Father,’ he explained, `just to look at you.’ Merely to see a holy man could be enough for a visitor. At his death, he instantly became an icon: `for by the archbishop’s orders the plank stood upright — the body [of Daniel the Stylite, died 493] had been fixed to it so that it could not fall — and thus, like an icon, the holy man was displayed to all from every side; and for many hours the people all looked at him and also with cries and tears besought him to be an advocate with God on behalf of them all.’ The holy man was a clearly-defined locus of the holy on earth" (p. 268).
Now comes the punch-line: "The icon merely filled a gap left by the physical absence of the holy man, whether this was due to distance or to death" (p. 269). The holy man had God-stuff infused into him. This "holiness" or charm spread to his clothing and other articles around him. After death, this charm was lodged in his body, the parts of which became relics along with his clothing and other objects associated with him. This charm was also lodged in pictures of him. As we have seen, this notion is predicated on a raw pagan, pantheistic, and mystical conception of "holiness."
Brown continues by stating that "[a]ltogether, the role of the holy man in Late Antiquity society — whether speaking, blessing, or just being seen standing in prayer — had been to translate the awesomely distant loving-kindness of God into the reassuring precision of a human face. The momentum of the search for a face made itself felt throughout the sixth century in changes in the traditional types of relics. Icons came to join the relics" (p. 272).
Now, from a Biblical viewpoint, every baptized believer is a holy person, and every living believer’s face is part of the image of God revealed through the human constitution. With the pagan view of "holiness," however, only certain persons were "holy men," for only they had the charm of holiness. Thus, instead of working for righteous living in the whole community of believers, with every believer a saint, the Iconodules separated some people as charmed and "holy," and since there were only a few of them, their relics and icons became important as substitutes for their living presence.
The holy man was a pretty much wholly pagan institution. The Bible teaches that it is desirable to be married and necessary to live in community with other believers. That is what the Church is all about. The holy man, however, separated from the "world" and lived by himself in the desert, or high atop a pillar, like some kind of Buddhist monk. The holy man was, thus, a pagan and anti-ecclesiastical figure, no matter that the Church officials tried to adopt him. Holiness was otherworldliness, not obedience to God in this world (which has become Christ’s world). The semi-Christianized masses looked to the holy man rather than to the Churchman for guidance. "It was to the holy man, and not to the bishop, that the early Byzantine layman instinctively turned to find out how he should behave" (p. 280). Brown writes further: "Holy men and icons were implicated on an even deeper level. For both were, technically, unconsecrated objects. Not only was the holy man not ordained as a priest or a bishop: his appeal was precisely that he stood outside the vested hierarchy of the Byzantine Church. He was holy because he was held to be holy by his clientele, not because any bishop had conferred holy orders on him. By the end of the sixth century, the exceptional position of the holy man was made explicit in formal gesture: a mystique of its own surrounded the monastic dress, the schema. It was the schema, and not consecration by the bishop, that conferred spiritual powers on the holy man" (pp. 280f.).
(to be continued)
