Emergent Theism

This is a short, basic-question-of-an-idea post just to get the thought out there. It winds up being not as short as I intended, but it's all stuff that interests me, meaning how it all connects in these ideas interests me (and note: a lot of the parentheticals would be footnotes if I were writing this out as a paper).

So, I have an MA in general Catholic theology and an MPhil (basically the PhD without dissertation and defense ... but that's a big "without," like half the degree, really ... I got a proposal passed and was trying to wrap up a draft of my intro chapter when I timed out) in theology with a focus in biblical studies with a concentration in Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. And now I copy-edit academic books and journals, among them biblical HB/OT. In 2016, a seminal HB/OT scholar named George Mendenhall died and I wound up doing a proofread for the publisher on a collection of his published essays edited by one of his longtime students, and his work on the Canaanite situation into which the "Hebrews" entered from the south interested me. I put it in quotes for his usage ... Mendenhall believed that there was probably a Moses who came north with a small group of refugees who, having quite possibly had a genuine theophany experience on their way north, became the base for a unification of disenfranchised indigenous Canaanites that became the "twelve tribes," with the name "Hebrew" itself coming from a Canaanite word for an outsider or fringe-dweller or pariah (a similar thing is true with the term "wandering Aramean" in Deut 29:5b in "my father was a wandering Aramean" as the beginning of a short poetic piece that may have been originally a cultic recitation stating identity with YHWH, with "wandering Aramean" being kind of like calling somebody a "gypsy" as a slam for being nomadic, reversing things by owning what was meant as a slur, now as a chosen sign of identification, like Hermione Granger's "mudblood and proud" ... had to work Harry Potter in there somehow, haha), and with the "tribes" really reversing the "inside–outside" relationship in which the city-states and their ba'als or lords were centers of ubermenschen-as-gods type power wielded for injustice against the disenfranchised, and with those power players and their cities now being the "Canaanites" to be thwarted and ruled by the "Hebrews/Israelites." I'm not sure how much I agree with the approach to historicity or what kind of historicity etc., but I will leave it there without answering those questions because what interests me is his idea that I have just described as "ubermenschen-as-gods" (the -en is the plural ending in German). It's not that Mendenhall necessarily thought that those societies thought "gods" were only ever a self-reflection by humans, like Feuerbach, or aspirations of certain humans, like Nietzsche: their may well have been conceptualizations of entities above the human level, but the distinction may not have been the way we think "gods" now, especially on the functional level of political power (one should read also a bit of Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances and his concept of "original participation" thinking in ancient cultures for insight on how those cultures may had some thinking other than either the pure-human immanence or the radical-spirituality transcendence categories in which we now think "gods").

Now, one of the long-standing questions in HB studies as an academic discipline before getting to examining it as the Christian OT is exactly how "monotheistic" it was (once it is the Christian OT, it's definitively full-on monotheistic in the terms we think monotheism now, or at least distinctively closer, and this "Christian OT" means also the Septuagint/LXX, the Greek translation of the HB commissioned by Alexander three centuries before Christ, which became THE authoritative version for nascent Christianity, and which was done in Greek language that had undergone shifts in thinking and meaning with the onset of Greek ontological thought some five centuries before Christ; I may have questions about the exact relations with and dispositions toward something like Stoicism, whether the disposition in the New Testament is negative or positive, but Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI is absolutely right in saying that interaction with Greek thought is a core constitutive part of the NT and Christian thought, and the sort of conceptual seeds of the thinking was in the translation of HB into the language hammered out in Greek philosophical thought [of course, the real and full source of all of it, not just the conceptual rubrics, is the Incarnation], for instance the fact that, while it disagreed almost diametrically with the Elean idea of "nothing comes from nothing" [by which they meant that all change is an allusion], the first statement we clearly have of the idea of creatio ex nihilo in 2 Maccabbees 7 states it in language that was very specifically developed in the Elean school of thinkers such as Parmenedes and their statement that "things that are" cannot come from "things that are not": the Jewish mother says to her seventh son before he is killed, "if God can make the world from things that were not, he can raise you and your brothers from the dead" [paraphrase]).

As an instance of where people would debate the level of monotheism in the HB, while I was trying to take an entirely new line of inquiry involving using metaphor to tie the passage to theology of the land, the passage on which I was going to work, Deut 32:8-9, has been the subject of mountains of research and discussion about the level or type of monotheism in it, because it speaks of the nations being divided among the gods and Israel being the nation assigned to YHWH (whether a one takes this as the two verses positively saying that there was a god higher than YHWH doing this depends on rendering the fact that it simply says the nations were apportioned to the gods and then says Israel is the portion of the LORD ... not as clear as "El gave Israel to YHWH"). Most agree that, even in their earliest canonical forms of any kind, they were distinctly read as on the monotheistic end of the spectrum of what we would classify as monotheism (meaning, here: 32:8-9 may have originated in "polytheistic" literature, but once inserted into Deut 32, the Song of Moses,  even before that chapter was inserted into the canonical book of Deuteronomy, those verses became protomonotheistic simply by being incorporated into that chapter as the "Song of Moses" that is definitely protomonotheist). This idea of a protomonotheism goes by several names, such as henatheism [one highest, or even unique, god] or ethical monotheism [it began with "worship only this god"], and there are important shades of distinction between those terms, but there is pretty much agreement that, whatever trace elements of "polytheism" are left behind in the language borrowed to talk about YHWH, the Hebrew Bible texts in their canonical forms are some form of "mono" and not "poly." Genesis 1 provides a good example here. It has two elements that look like trace "polytheism": (1) "let US create man in OUR own image" and (2) the fact that the name Elohim is morphologically both masculine and feminine plural (the base is the name of the Canaanite high god El, then you add the fem plural ending -oth, and in Hebrew if you add another ending onto an original th [Hebrew letter thav] ending [Hebrew does this adding on of endings a lot: "im" = with, "u" = first person plural ending' "an" is a connector, and El is God, so im-anu-el is "with us [is] God"; ergo Immanuel = "God is with us"], the th changes to h [Hebrew letter heh] as the connector, which happens here because you then add the masculine plural ending -im, so El-o[t]h-im). But the canonical text is clearly at least protomonotheistic, because all the verbs used with Elohim, including "SAID let us create humanity in our own image," are masculine singular.

Combining this question of emergent monotheism with Mendenhall's ideas on the human power players as "ba'als," a term that originally means lord or husband but gets used as the name of a god or gods, my question is whether maybe it is not so much, or not just, monotheism that is new with the Hebrew Bible, but "theism" itself: the sharp distinction between human and "divine." Maybe the fact that the line is blurry between ba'als as human lords and Ba'al the "god" while the Hebrew Bible is often at pains to NOT blur the line between Elohim/YHWH and, say, Adam or Moses, or even say, David's son, the messiah, as the adopted son of God (this is the messiah as originally purely human: before the "messiah" became the one-and-future character in the shift to apocalyptic thinking in Judaism with the loss of the monarchy after the exile, but really coming into shape in the first century BC/BCE, the messiah was simply an ongoing office filled by a human, the present king from the line of David in Jerusalem; all the messianic prophecies had a literal fulfillment before Christ, fulfilled by Solomon and Rehoboam, all the way down to Zedekiah and Jehoiachin, although these last two did not live up to the calling) means that really some form of "theism" itself is new to the HB, what I have called in the title of this post, "emergent theism" (we don't get full-on thinking like this, or at least clear categorization and distinct conceptualization of it, until Greek ontological thought, but that doesn't mean that there can't be a precursor to it in a culturally different but still similar mode of thinking here).

One of the things that would interest me as an avenue of inquiry here is the heavy emphasis on the distinction of the divine from the human in the Pentateuch, particularly the cultic and holiness/purity material. One of the theories about the purity laws (particularly following on Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger) is that their logic is to emphasize the distinction between God and humans. One didn't eat bottom feeders like crustaceans and pigs because they feed on refuse, meaning decay, meaning dead stuff, and life and death are really supposed to be touched only by God; you don't eat blood, according to Lev 17:10-11 because it contains the "life" (Hebrew nephesh; it is stated here that part of the reason not to eat the blood in common life is that the blood of sacrifices has a special role on the altar, in the cultic life of the people); one didn't touch corpses because that is death; and menstrual and birth blood made a woman ritually "impure" because of their closeness to the generation of life, and life in its raw form is God's domain. All of these things were not moral impurity, and in fact  number of them are impossible to avoid--not just menstruation and childbirth for women, but one has to touch corpses to move them to burial if one doesn't want piles of bodies around to trip over. And ritual "impurity" could be cleared up in small, simple official sacrifices: outside of the ingestion instances, which one can control, ritual impurity was impossible to avoid but easy to clear up (but you had to clear it up before participating in the cultic life of the community again) ... the point of the system was to keep that distinction ever before the eyes of the people in these everyday ways of ritual impurity happening by touching the realms that are the purview of God and having to then get ritually clean (the idea, say, of connection between sex/procreation and the divine is not new, as this is basically what fertility religion does [whether or not thinking made it into concrete practices of temple prostitution is a debated question, but a number of the old deities definitely specifically symbolized fertility in the myths about them], but making a sharp distinction between divine and human in the connection is).

Anyway, the question idea of this whole post is whether the whole emphasis on the distinction between God and humanity, combined with something like Mendenhall's thoughts on the ba'als of the Canaanite city-states, makes the HB not just a system of emergent or proto-monotheism that came out against the backdrop of a world that was polytheistic in the way we think of polytheism now, as a belief in the "existence" of multiple "gods," but the emergence of a basic proto-theism in any form, mono or poly, the emergence of new thinking about the distinction of divinity from humanity. Admittedly, this is a VERY rough-form idea with a whole lot of ways to get off track from sound research and conceptualization and it would take not just a lot more work than I am able to do right now, but also a higher level of type of work. But the possibility does interest me ever since reading Mendenhall's work on the lords of city-states in Canaan as ba'als ... the idea that part of what may have been so unique was not just the emergence of monotheism, but the emergence of any "theism" as a clear distinction between divinity and humanity that defines the way we think "theism" in general.

[Note: It would take much longer to work it in here, but I did a paper in MA work on Gen 6:1-4 defending the pantheonic interpretation as not challenging monotheism, using some observations by Joseph Campbell (in the interview with Bill Moyer published as The Power of Myth) on basically what I call in persona thinking in aboriginal tribes to offer a hypothetical model of a reading that could be pantheonic in reference without being polytheistic in ontological or metaphysical belief because it was rhetorical against a real-world practice at the time basing itself in claims of "gods" procreating with humans  ... the point being that it's possible that the author of that passage even in its earliest form was not concerned with a question of "are we saying other gods exist," but rather, "when you hear these priests saying that their god has begotten a child with a woman, don't worry about whether it is only that the priest begot the child claiming to be acting in persona of the god versus some god actually doing it ... simply stay away from all of it ... that kind of behavior is what brought on the flood; whether the offspring, the nephalim, were actually incubi spawned by demons or actual sons of lesser-but-still-real gods or only despots who arose because a shaman got everyone to believe they were semi-divine, one way or another, whatever it was, that was what brought on the flood as punishment, so stay away from any of it, just focus on worshiping YHWH" ... basically, whether the "gods" "existed" or not, the heterodox practices did exist in the name of these gods, and the point is to stay away from those practices.]

[Caveat: I have to briefly address the issue of inspiration and the relevance of when I say things like "in the language borrowed to talk about YHWH" and talk about canonization as a long historical process, meaning the canonical version of a text being something that developed over time: that the arrival at a canonical text was a matter of a text materially developing over time always in a context of religious use, rather than the text being whole and static and then proposed and passed as canonical, like the enactment of laws in U.S. government. Even the NT has more compositional and redactional history than that, but particularly the letters of Paul are much, much closer to that idea of a static text that then receives canonical status (although the Christian idea is not that they became inspired at the time of canonization, but rather that canonization was God revealing through the authority of the Church that these texts were inspired from the start). So, when I speak of the HB having a long history of canonization involving a long history of composition of the texts in the canon, where exactly does the idea of divine inspiration fit into that: at what stage in that history of composition is the text "inspired" and on what basis? That last idea of "basis" means the role of the human author: I believe that there was a real Moses who had a real theophany experience and that what was communicated there was the author-itative base for textual formulation using borrowed language of the times and done by people in direct descent from Moses who "sat in the seat of Moses" in some way as a real institutional authority, which is not the same as saying that Moses actually composed the language itself that we now have, by hand himself or even by dictation. So, where in that "institutional" history between the theophany to Moses and our present canonical text does "inspiration" happen? I don't have an answer to that at present. But I am noting that it is a very essential question and have to admit it here and admit that it intersects the "rough idea" I have tried to outline here about emergent theism. I have a book on my shelf by James T. Burtchaell called Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration since 1810 that I have not gotten around to reading yet but would really like to read to delve into magisterial teaching on inspiration and what of it might bear on the historical-critical examination of the Hebrew Bible. I just haven't made it around to that yet. I studied what I would call the "original sense" in the HB, which is is not necessarily synonymous with the "literal sense" in the medieval system for Scripture called the "quadriga," which is about the relation between the literal, allegorical, tropological/moral, and anagogical "senses." The question here is how the development of the canonical shape of the original sense in the Hebrew Bible relates to inspiration, and I don't have an answer yet that I would state unequivocally, but I do want to admit that it is a VERY important question for believing in the Bible as meaningful to faith and present relationship with God and not simply as a historical artifact studied scientifically. But I also believe it is possible to make such critical explorations without having yet pinned down that answer (and, indeed, "the Word of God in human words" may be a mystery we never have a complete answer to, so requiring a completely satisfactory answer on inspiration before doing any historical research would mean that you never do the latter, but you need to do the latter when you believe that the word of God was given in a language from a specific historical setting and you have to figure out how to translate that language into the present language in such a way that you maintain the belief in both those halves: that it was communicated in that language as that language truly existed [that it was fully quasi-incarnational as the written record of the Incarnation and the salvation history it culminates, that the communication of that record took on the full flesh of that language's historical existence] and that we can have access to that meaning today as the ongoing locus of the inspired form of Scripture); you just have to admit that your findings will have to be coordinated with and in some way obedient to higher authority (while somehow also still retaining a proper independence for that science, the independence necessary to do its work but not the autonomy that divorces that work from the living power of Scripture in the ongoing life of the People of God relating to God ... not at all an easy feat, if even fully achievable in this life).]

So, anyway, that wound up being not so short as I hoped, but as with all the stuff I put on this blog, I'm attempting to both record and process a lot of the things I have learned over the years and idea I have had about it all and how different parts intersect.