Categories
Eschatology Ezekiel

Ezekiel, Eschatology, and Fishing

Ezekiel 47 continues Ezekiel’s eschatological vision.  This vision features a renewed Temple, with impossible dimensions, suggesting that the Temple is a figure for God’s presence.  Ezekiel sees a river flowing from under the Temple and is led by his guide into the water.  The water gets progressively deeper until it became “deep enough to swim in, a river that could not be crossed.”  (Ez. 47:5, NRSV).  Back on the riverbank, Ezekiel’s guide tells him that

This water flows toward the eastern region and goes down into the Arabah; and when it enters the sea, the sea of stagnant waters, the water will become fresh. Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish, once these waters reach there. It will become fresh; and everything will live where the river goes. People will stand fishing beside the sea from En-gedi to En-eglaim; it will be a place for the spreading of nets; its fish will be of a great many kinds, like the fish of the Great Sea.  But its swamps and marshes will not become fresh; they are to be left for salt. On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.

(Ez. 47:8-12.)  This amazing vision of a river teeming with living creatures and fish, and trees laden with fruit and healing leaves, echoes the creation creation narratives in Genesis 1 and 2 and is picked up again in Revelation 21-22.  As a fisherman, I love this image of people spreading nets and enjoying abundance all along the banks of the river or sea.  Here, the locations Ezekiel mentions are along the Dead Sea, so the image seems to reflect a change in at least part of that hyper-salty basin so that fish and other wildlife can thrive.  Since the Temple Ezekiel describes seems metaphorical, we probably can assume this is also a metaphor for a broader renewal of creation.  But the eschatological picture is not ethereal or abstracted from created reality.  It is of regular people, doing regular things, in a real world.

IMG:  Wikimedia Commons, Peter Van der Sluijs

Categories
Ezekiel Luther Science and Religion

Jenson on Secondary Causes and Divine Hiddenness

Continuing in my reading of Ezekiel with Robert Jenson, I come to his commentary on Ezekiel 30:20-26.  This pericope is unremarkable, in that it is part of series of judgments against Gentile nations found in this part of the overall text.  Here, God pronounces judgment against Egypt:  “Then they will know that I am the Lord, when I put my sword into the hand of the king of Babylon and he brandishes it against Egypt.”  (Ezekiel 30:25).  Jenson’s interest in his theological commentary is about how God acts through agents within the created order, like the King of Babylon.  I’m going to set out Jenson’s commentary at length because I think he states the problem correctly, with one qualification I mention at the end of this post.  I don’t think his proposed approach, rooted in a Lutheran sense of God’s hiddenness, however, is really all that fruitful.  Here is how Jenson describes the problem.  (Quotes below are from Jenson, 237-239.)

[T]he theologically most striking feature of this prophecy is its drastic identification of the Lord himself as the one who determines and indeed fights the battles waged by created armies. An actual pharaoh is or will be made militarily incapable; it is the Lord who breaks his arms. Nebuchadnezzar has been or will be victorious; the sword that wins victory is the Lord’s own, put into Nebuchad­nezzar’s hand. Leaving aside at this point the question of God’s involvement in violence (7 7:10- 27), how are we to understand the relation between God’s act and creatures’ act, when the event itself is but one?

The question has been posed and debated throughout theological history. Traditional scholastic theology, Catholic and Protestant, has said that God is the “primary cause” of created events, which within creation have also created “secondary causes.” Thus God is here the primary cause of Egypt’s disaster, and Nebuchadnezzar the secondary cause. The doctrine is descriptively correct, but it is doubtful that it does much more than restate the problem. Through the latter part of the previous century, several movements attempted to place the scheme within a more substantive theory-in my judgment, without great success.

Jenson then describes contemporary efforts to solve the problem (and I love here his reference to the fact that Christian philosophers really are doing theology — the presumptions of Christian analytic philosophy of religion irritate me to no end):

Thus some Christian members of philosophy departments have taken to doing what is in fact theology. They are especially occupied with the question: How is an eternal God’s agency within time possible? In my view they pose the question in a way that makes a faithful answer impossible, for they tend to use words like “eternal” or “agency” or “time” so uncritically within an Aristotelian frame that the notion of an eternal reality’s agency in time becomes a simple oxymoron. If to be “eternal” is simply to be “not temporal;” than an eternal entity cannot do a temporal act, and  there is little more to be said.

Some other recent movements have taken an opposite, drastically revisionary path. Process theology among liberal theologians and open theism among evangelicals have produced metaphysically more or less coherent accounts of primary divine agency and secondary temporal agency. But they have done so only by revising Christian language about God past all biblical recognition. A God who is one pole of a universal process is not the God of Ezekiel or any other prophet.

So far, I think Jenson has rightly diagnosed the problem, and that he has rightly suggested that process theology and open theism are not viable alternatives.  He then makes another move I think is vital, which is to note that in the classical theological tradition God is not an entity within the universe, so any talk of God’s causality, whether “primary” or otherwise, can only be analogical:

I have a diagnosis and suggestion. At least since the advent of modernity, West­ern thought has tended to see the universe as a system, a self-contained process determined by immanent regularities; much modern theology has-sometimes subliminally-accepted this vision. When the world is envisioned in this fashion, God is willy-nilly envisioned as a second something external to the world. Then the question necessarily becomes: How does the eternal God intervene in the temporal system, without wrecking it? And the obvious answer  is that he cannot: either it is simply closed to him, or his entry will compromise its constitutive laws.

But scripture does not envision the creation as a system at all, but rather-as Ezekiel and this commentary have all along construed the matter-as a history.

This vision poses quite a different question: How does God  present himself as an actor in the drama of history?

After this useful diagnosis and suggestion, however, I think Jenson’s proposal relies too heavily on a Lutheran theology of God’s hiddenness:

In ancient drama, the actors brought the gods and heroes into the theater by and as masks behind which the actors hid and through which they spoke; within the ceremony  the masks were the dramatis personae. Martin Luther adduced this phenomenon, but reversed the relation of actors and masks. God brings the created heroes and villains of the temporal drama onto history’s stage as masks that hide him-for were he to appear barefaced creation would perish. Thus Nebuchadnez­zar and his like are larva dei, God’s masks-as indeed are all creatures in one way or another. And we masks truly are the personae  of the drama; we are not puppets manipulated by someone distant from us. Yet behind us hides the Creator.

Calling the created carriers of history masks of God may at first sight seem to be a figure, not to be taken with ontological seriousness. But we should remember that the great metaphysical categories are always created by drafting ordinary language for heavy ontological duty. To instance Scholasticism’s language for our present matter, God is of course not  a “cause” within any such cluster of cause and effect as quotidian language presumes; thus when the tradition calls him the primary cause of created events it drafts “cause” to serve in an alien discourse. And when Luther and I propose instead to draft “mask” for metaphysical duty, we perform the same move-but, just possibly, more appropriately.

Although I do think there are some important insights in this perspective, I’m not sure how it advances the ball over the Thomistic-Aristotelian categories of primary and secondary causality.  In particular, I think Jenson’s view of causality here tends to eliminate the genuine agency and freedom of creatures that the Thomistic-Aristotelian categories seek to preserve within the domain of secondary causation.

And here is my qualification about how Jenson states the problem:  I think the Thomistic-Aristotelian framework does much more than merely “restate the problem” and that contemporary philosophers of religion have mostly abandoned the “Aristotelian frame” in favor of a materialist-naturalist frame.  Much of the work in philosophical theology on these problems of causality, along with much of the modern philosophy of science, rejects formal and final causality and focuses on on what an Aristotelian frame would consider material and efficient causes.  This makes sense if the material universe is all there is, because the rules of energy and matter tell us that physical causation is a closed system.  But Christian theology insists that the material universe is not all there is, and that in fact the material universe was created by God, who is by definition transcendent of creation and not material.  The question, then, is how to speak of God’s transcendent causality while retaining the contingent freedom and reality of causality within the universe.

Of course, as Jenson notes, anything we say here is bound to involve “drafting ordinary language for heavy ontological duty” — that is, to require analogical reasoning.  But the Thomistic-Aristotelian framework is a way of expressing God’s transcendent causality as the source and goal of the acts of creatures within their appropriate sphere of creaturely freedom.  This brings a bit more clarity and sharpness to our thinking, which is of course not an “explanation,” but is more than a mere restatement.

In addition, concerning creaturely freedom, the Thomistic-Aristotelian synthesis emphasizes that no creature has the absolute freedom God enjoys, but rather creatures have certain limited range of powers, dispositions, and capacities of action given to them by God.  Nebuchadnezzar, then, was created with the power and capacity to act as God’s agent of judgment, and he was capable of various dispositions to act or not act.  That God gave Nebuchadnezzar these created powers and capacities, and that God may have influenced (though not determined) Nebuchadnezzar’s disposition to exercise them on a particular occasion, involves both God’s “action” and Nebuchadnezzar’s free agency, and seems consistent with the Biblical text.  I’m not sure why the rubric of Lutheran “hiddenness” is better on these fronts — or even if it is really much different.

 

Categories
Economics Eschatology Ezekiel

Ezekiel, Nature, and Grace

In my ongoing reading of Ezekiel along with Robert Jenson’s Brazos Commentary, I came to the amazing poem in Ezekiel 27:1-36.  This text is a lament over the fall of Tyre, a pagan port and trading city on an island.  The poem pictures Tyre as a splendid ship:

They made all your planks
    of fir trees from Senir;
they took a cedar from Lebanon
    to make a mast for you.
From oaks of Bashan
    they made your oars;
they made your deck of pines
    from the coasts of Cyprus,
    inlaid with ivory.
Of fine embroidered linen from Egypt
was your sail,
    serving as your ensign; 
blue and purple from the coasts of Elishah
    was your awning.

The texts lists every sort of valuable good traded with Tyre by surrounding nations, including Israel:

silver, iron, tin, and lead . . . human beings and vessels of bronze . . .horses, war-horses, and mules . . . ivory tusks and ebony . . . turquoise, purple, embroidered work, fine linen, coral, and rubies . . . wheat . . . millet,honey, oil, and balm . . .wine of Helbon, and white wool . . . wrought iron, cassia . . .saddlecloths for riding . . . lambs, rams, and goats . . . all kinds of spices, and all precious stones, and gold . . . choice garments, . . . clothes of blue and embroidered work, and . . .carpets of coloured material, bound with cords and made secure. . . .

Notwithstanding its prosperity, Tyre ultimately is set up for judgment and ruin:

Your riches, your wares, your merchandise,
    your mariners and your pilots,
your caulkers, your dealers in merchandise,
    and all your warriors within you,
with all the company
    that is with you,
sink into the heart of the seas
    on the day of your ruin.

It’s tempting to suggest Tyre is judged because of its luxuries, but the text doesn’t exactly say so.  In fact, in his commentary, Jenson suggests that God regrets that Tyre must face judgment:

In our text, God regards humanity’s natural achievements with admiration, but he does so within a context of sorrow for their failure, a failure that is measured by the supernatural demands and promises made to his own people.  This suggests, for one thing, that the gift of natural goods to all humanity is not finally independent of the gifts made in history to God’s people:  the story of the Lord’s conflicts with and benefits to his people encompasses the stories of the Lord with the Gentile nations — how that is to be worked metaphysically currently divides the theologians.  And it further suggests that that the Lord’s supernatural regard to natural gifts is always at once affirming and mournful.

Jenson Commentary, 217.  Jenson’s comment puts the lament of the fall of “Babylon the Great” in Revelation 18 — clearly, I think, an echo of this text from Ezekiel — into a somewhat new light for me.  Revelation 18:11 contains a similar list of luxury cargo:

And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo any more, cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron, and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, olive oil, choice flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, slaves—and human lives.

Perhaps here, too, God regrets the destruction of these cultural artifacts, although I think both here and in Ezekiel the inclusion of human beings / slaves suggests part of how the culture became corrupt.  Yet in Revelation 21, we see the New Jerusalem, a city built of gold and jewels, to which the “kings of the Earth” bring their glory (Rev. 21:24), suggesting that the finest things of culture are not finally destroyed after all.

Categories
Biblical Studies Ezekiel

Ezekiel: Jenson on Prophecy

I’ve been enjoying reading through Ezekiel lately with Robert Jenson’s Brazos Commentary.  For any modern Christian reader, one of the problems presented by a text like Ezekiel is that of delayed prophecy.  Ezekiel speaks to the exiles in Babylon, who have grown cynical.  In Ezekiel 12:21-28, this discourse reaches one of many points at which God instructs Ezekiel to announce that judgment will no longer be delayed:

 

Mortal, what is this proverb of yours about the land of Israel, which says, “The days are prolonged, and every vision comes to nothing”?  Tell them therefore, “Thus says the Lord God: I will put an end to this proverb, and they shall use it no more as a proverb in Israel.” But say to them, The days are near, and the fulfillment of every vision.  For there shall no longer be any false vision or flattering divination within the house of Israel.  But I the Lord will speak the word that I speak, and it will be fulfilled. It will no longer be delayed; but in your days, O rebellious house, I will speak the word and fulfill it, says the Lord God.  (Ezekiel 12: 22-25 (NRSV)).

From the perspective of the New Testament, and of Christian theology, however, Ezekiel’s prophecies were delayed, initially until the coming of Christ, and subsequently until Christ’s future return.  The premodern Christian interpretive strategy was to view such passages as prefiguring Christ.  One modern strategy, which Jenson calls neo-Protestant, has been to de-historicize all Biblical eschatological hopes within a metaphysical view that negates any possibility of any teleology in history.  Another modern strategy, represented by dialectical theologians such as Karl Barth, was to render the Bible’s eschatological hopes as expressions of an immanent crisis to which each person is subject.  Yet another modern strategy, represented by dispensational theology and fundamentalism, was to render the ancient texts as code books for deciphering contemporary events.

Against such modern trends, Jenson argues for a return to premodern exegesis, although in sympathy with dialectical theology, he is content to let the ambiguity and lack of resolution do its own work.  I appreciate Jenson’s comments here:

Let us suppose that we find neither neo-Protestantism’s nor dialectical theology’s resolutions satisfactory.  What then?

We should — in my view — begin by retrieving the church’s premodern construal.  The New Testament does in fact think that all the promises of God are fulfilled in Christ (e.g., Rom. 15:8), and so should Christian theology.  It is becoming even more obvious:  modern scholars’ insistence that the original sense of Old Testament anticipation cannot be christological or ecclesiological is not itself a scholarly result but an antecedent ideological construal of how history works.  There is no need to share this construal.

We must, to be sure, be very careful not to suggest that, because the promises have been fulfilled in Christ, they no longer apply to the Jews as a people. But a nonsupersessionist construal is indeed possible and in some part already achieved.

If we go on from the fulfillment of the Old Testament in Christ, the problems of delay devolve into one:  the so-called delay of the parousia.  And here the first thing to say is that the failure of primal Christianity’s expectation of Christ’s immediate advent is a plausible reason not to believe the gospel that proclaimed it.  If after nearly two millennia we find that gospel so compelling that we continue to hope, we should acknowledge that such a hope speaks a great “nevertheless.”

Finnally, if we ask why the Lord is so slow, we may indeed adapt 2 Peter’s answer.  Those who write an dread this commentary should not complain that God did not end history millennia ago; he lingers to make room for us.

Jenson, Ezekial Commentary, 109-110.

Categories
Comparative Religion Ezekiel

Ezekiel’s Theophany and the Bhagavad Gita

ezekielI’ve been reading the book of Ezekiel along with Robert Jenson’s excellent commentary.  The text of Ezekiel opens with the prophet’s vision of God, a theophany.  Ezekiel describes “a great cloud with fire flashing forth continually and a bright light around it, and in its midst something like glowing metal in the midst of the fire,” strange beasts with four wings and four faces, a series of sparkling wheels, an expanse above the creatures’ stretched out wings, and a throne occupied by a fiery human form.  (Ezekiel 1:1-26.)

vishnuOn a long drive this weekend, I listened to an audiobook of the Bhagavad Gita, and I was struck by the resonances between the theophany granted by Krishna / Vishnu to Arjuna in Chapter 11 of the Gita and the theophany given to Ezekiel.  The text says “Arjuna saw in that universal form unlimited mouths, unlimited eyes, unlimited wonderful visions.”  (BG 11:10-11.)  Vishnu “spread throughout the sky and the planets and all space between” and Arjuna saw him “devouring all people in [his] flaming mouths and covering the universe with [his] immeasurable rays.”  When Arjuna asks about Vishnu’s purpose, Vishnu replies, in the quote made famous in the modern west by Oppenheimer, “Time [or Death] I am, destroyer of the worlds, and I have come to engage all people.”  (BG 11:32.)

mesoIt is obvious that Ezekiel draws its theophanic imagery from Assyrian and Babylonian symbolism, including figures such as this one that I photographed in the Ancient Near Eastern Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I’m not sure if the author of the Gita was influenced at all by Ancient Near Eastern sources.  No one is sure who wrote the Gita, and scholars date it from 400 BCE to 200 CE, so its influences are unclear, but there certainly was commerce between the Indus and Euphrates valleys from ancient times.

Beyond any direct paralells, I think Ezekiel’s and Arjuna’s visions share a common sense of the ineffability of the Divine, particularly as the transcendent vision of the Divine breaks into history.  For the Gita, the devouring mouths of Vishna represent how “time” consumes all human plans, dreams, ideals and hopes.  Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, quoted a translation that rendered Vishna’s self-naming as “Death,” but my understanding is that the better translation is “Time.”  At first I thought this could be significant.  The Hindu cosmogeny involves endless cycles of death and rebirth, while the Hebrew comogeny, as taken up by Christianity, involves a creation, fall, and final redemption.

But that is perhaps too pat a comparison.  In the Hindu cosmogeny reflected in the Gita, “Time” judges the pretensions of history by its infinite cycles in which all histories end and new histories begin.  For Ezekiel’s vision, God judges history, particularly Israel’s history, by calling the pretensions of humanity to account before the inescapable fiery wheel of God’s presence.  When parts of Ezekiel’s vision are taken up in the New Testament book of Revelation, Jesus is revealed as the true principle of “Time”:  “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty'” (Rev. 1:8) and “’It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end'” (Rev. 21:6) and I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 22:13).  

Both the Gita and the theophanies of Ezekiel and Revelation suggest that “Death” and “Time” are inseparable, but that both are swallowed by eternity.   The real differences, though subtle, reside in how these texts understand incarnation and resurrection.  In the Gita, Vishnu is incarnate in Krishna for the purpose of a revelation to Arjuna about the eternal cycles of reincarnation.  In Ezekiel, God is not literally incarnate but is made present to Israel in the person of the prophet Ezekiel, who pronounces a judgment on Israel’s history.  In Revelation, the incarnate Son surpasses Death and Time through a resurrection that is final and complete.

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Angels Image Source:  Wikimedia Commons.

Vishnu Image Source:  Based on Wikipedia content that has been reviewed, edited, and republished. Original image by Steve Jurvetson. Uploaded by , published on 05 September 2013 under the following license: Creative Commons: Attribution