I finally finished this book, and it was quite an interesting experience.
On the first level as a translator, because Ashworth gives quite lengthy explanations to the task of translating a text. As a translator I have always tried to get the meaning across (as I understood it) and not to translate word for word in a literal fashion. However Ashworth shows that sometimes you have to go back to the root of a word for the context to become clear.
Nothing reveals more clearly what is specific about a particular word than determining what is consistent about it in a number of different contexts.
And this creates a conundrum, as sometimes the root of the word cannot be translated in one word, but needs a longer term, which makes the text difficult to read. But he shows how translating the Bible has often obfuscated the true meaning by sloppy (or deliberately misleading?) translation, sometimes literally putting the meaning on its head.
On the next level it was interesting to read for me in my search on Divinity in general. I haven’t read many religious or theological books in my life. Most of the ones I have read are either woefully naive and dumb (you just need to believe - whatever that means - and you are saved!), or so over the top discussing theological arcana for me that I don’t understand much. This book is an exception - it is emminently readable. What is so splendid about this book is that its author very carefully and slowly builds up his argument, and his argumentation is easily followed by any reader even without the ‘technical’ Bible knowledge.
As I have described elswhere on this forum, I have embarked on this search for Divinity a while ago. This search has had two main thrusts:
Firstly, I delved into the debate between ID and Neodarwinism - clearly finding that ID wins hands down. Which obviously raises the question of Divinity as the ‘intelligence’ or ‘creator’ behind the design. I am not yet persuaded that looking from this angle automatically gives rise to the existence of God or a creator. I can see a few alternatives that seem to me to be palusible, too - for instance that the universe has been around forever, never really has been ‘created’, and has as an intrinsic property that life gets created on an ongoing basis. Maybe we were created by more advanced ‘beings’, which in turn were created by other ‘beings’ and so on ad infinitum. The study of ID has made me at least an agnostic (from my former atheistic position), and probably more - at least there is some organizing’ or ‘creative’ potential in the universe - a far cry form the cold, mechanical and meaningless universe from before.
Secondly, I have read many ‘afterlife’ accounts. And while there are differences between all of them, they also on one level show a remarkable similarity. This study has raised the probability of humans (or at least some of them) possessing a soul (a part of human beings) that survives physical death. Somehow I find the possibility that life doesn’t end after the body expires to be quite plausible, and in line with the teachings of the Cs.
Getting back to Ashworth’s book. What is astonishing for me is the similarities between Paul’s thoughts and what we have heard the Cs say over the years (and G. of course as well). In the following few paragraphs I’m going to give you a few things that I found memorable in the book. Its a bit of a synopsis of the main ideas of the book, but of course to get the whole careful argumentation you’ll have to read the book. I hope this will give you enough incentive to do that (if you haven’t already done that).
The first important part of the book is Paul’s concept of the orgininal sin, which in my view closely parallels the Cs:
In the first part of this chapter, it was argued that Paul understands the fundamental sin as the identification which each human person makes with their separate, mortal, fleshly existence. Just as the flesh is always subject to infirmity so the mind that is set on the flesh is similarly infirm. The point was made that any assertive striving of humankind identified with the flesh is doomed to frustration because of the mortality and infirmity of the flesh.
The concept of the ‘original sin’ never really made a lot of sense to me. What’s wrong with knowledge? And if it was a ‘forbidden fruit’, why the hell did God (omnipotent, omniscient) put the damn tree in the Garden of Eden in the first place?
Ashworth (or rather Paul) deals at lenght with this question. His answer is as interesting, as it is astonishing: The ‘original sin’ consisted of loosing sight of the creator and replacing that with ‘what is created’ (material things):
The selfishness that is the consequence of being ‘identified with the flesh’ is precisely the ‘plight’ of humankind. The limited perception that inevitably arises from a self-centred point of view makes it impossible to even see, yet alone to live, the liberated and completely unselfish life of the Spirit.
Hence they had to revolt against God at some stage to become fully emancipated and free. So the ‘original sin’ was necessary for humans, as they were created in the ‘image of God’:
Humankind aligned with what God requires with no choice in the matter is not free. Humankind aligned with what God requires, knowing the serious consequences of action, any action, knowing the reality of good and evil, is in a position of freedom.
Paul likens the process of liberation to the transition between childhood and adulthood: While as a child we had to live under the law of our parents (the Jewish people following the Mosaic Law) to keep us safe and prevent us from walking off the path, at some stage we have to grow up and ‘create our own laws’ as adults (living by Faith). And to be able to do so, we need to intimately know the consequences of our doings (to know good and evil). In that regard, the ‘original sin’ was a necessary stage to adulthood, to emancipate us from the slavery of the Law that was imposed on us from ‘outside’ (given by God).
Essential to the liberation – the ‘salvation’ – that Paul is claiming has been effected in him by God, is the revealing of the slavery that he has been under which he has not previously perceived. Paul sees a universal significance in what he has been shown in his own experience: all are trapped in this ‘plight’ and all can be liberated from it by faith.
Note that this slavery is not perceived by those still in chains (Plato’s cave analogy comes to mind.
Liberation is a form of death - analogous to G’s teaching. The other point that is introduced mirrors the C’s concept of STS vs STO - Paul calls it ‘selfishness’ vs. ‘righteousness’.
Firstly, it has been suggested how there is a sharp dividing line in Paul’s thought with that which is of God on one side and that which falls short of the glory of God on the other. It has also been suggested that by ‘sin’ Paul is meaning the ‘selfish assertion of the individual’ and that this selfish assertion has to die for the individual to be transferred to ‘God’s side of the line’. [...] Paul is presenting the view that after this ‘transfer across the line ‘, after the death of ‘selfish assertiveness’, after ‘absolution ‘, human actions themselves reveal or ‘show’ God’s righteousness, God’s manner of existing, God’s way of doing what is right.
The next interesting point is what Paul means by ‘living in Faith’:
In the light of the new life of liberation that Paul says has now come about in which he and others are empowered to act rightly, Paul perceives that, in the radical identification of humankind with ‘the flesh’ which is infirm and dies, all come under the power of death, experienced, not only as a deeply rooted sense that death comes when the physical body dies, but, as a ‘state of deadness’, the universal condition of limited perception and understanding described in Romans 7:7–25 which is characterized by an inability to know what is right and act consistently in line with that knowledge.
So ‘living in Faith’ means to know (or rather hear, as in hearing what God says) what is right and consequently how to act rightly. And this happens through direct knowledge of God’s will (it is kind of like we become the instrument through which God speaks - we are ‘possesed’ by or ‘slaves’ of God). And by ‘living in Faith’ we get ‘liberated’. However, this liberation is only partial (the gift has been given ‘in part’ or as a ‘first installment’). To illustrate this point Paul uses the image of a seed, that may grow into a plant at a future date. We only inherit this liberation in potential (wheras Paul and the apostles got the full deal). So the full liberation is something that a) will happen sometimes in the future, and b) will involve ALL of humankind. Just as ‘living in sin’ is part of every human’s experince:
As the visible, mortal creation and the invisible, eternal things of the Creator co-exist in each human being, the experience of the fall – exchanging the truth of God for the lie and identifying life with the physical body – is part of the consciousness of each person.
And ‘to live in Faith’ is to render obedience and trust to God, even when seemingly this stands in contradiction with something God told the person before (like in the example of Abraham, who was to kill Isaac, even though God had promised him that Isaac would form a new people) or when this faith led to death (as in Jesus case):
Faith, according to Paul, is obedience to the living word of God in each moment. There is no way of ‘fixing’ God’s guidance, of capturing God’s word in written form, ‘the letter’. The most extreme demonstration of this claim is that, as demonstrated in the way Jesus goes to his death and in the way Abraham is prepared to sacrifice Isaac, faithfulness demands following this living word even when it seemingly contradicts what God has promised.
So ‘doing what is right’ means sticking to my own convictions, even if it might mean the end of my bodily existence. This reminds me of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, where he says that a prisoner entering the Gulag system had essentially two choices: To either survive at any cost, and that would be costly in moral terms, or to not cross certain moral lines, in which case this person would be dead within one year. Death looses its frightfulness, if one has found faith (in God, the creator, the universe whatever), and maybe (maybe because I never had to make this kind of choice) to live ‘the right way’ becomes easier.
The next parallel with what we have been exploring on the forum is how a spiritual transformation is changing how the person is being perceived by others still emmeshed with the “normal life’. This becoming ‘a fool’ is something I have experienced firsthand. Many of my friends told me that (after my moral bankrupcy and my subsequent forays on the forum) I had changed - and in their view not for good - I had become ‘strange’ and ‘foolish’.
This is a point that Paul touches as well:
What this amounts to, when set alongside several other texts from this section of the letter, is Paul’s understanding that what has been done by God is to invert the worldly perception of wisdom. It is the ‘foolishness’ of the apostles that Paul is keen to profess. [...] He is saying that the wisdom of the world, that is, human wisdom, is foolishness to God but with a very particular sense: human wisdom is an actual obstacle to perceiving the things of God. Just as in the account of the ‘exchange’ or ‘fall’, the assertion of human wisdom leads to the loss of perception of the invisible things of God, so, says Paul, in order to become wise in the things of God, it is necessary to become a fool in the terms of the world. The clear implication is that human wisdom simply cannot perceive the things of God.
Paul described this new life as a kind of warfare - Ashworth tells us:
It is not difficult to see that such a task – exercising what Paul calls ‘divine power’ to oppose any ‘fleshly’ human assertion against the knowledge of God – has the potential to bring strong resistance and acute conflict.
I think that is something most of us are familiar with as well - if we start talking about what we have found, we usually encounter strong resistance and possible hostility - that’s where G’s concept of “internal vs external consideration’ comes into play. This leads to a further parallel in regards to ‘suffering’ - as an integral part of transitioning from the ‘old to the new life’:
So Paul is able to talk with complete conviction about the reality of liberation from sin and how the completely unselfish life looks like complete folly to the eyes of the world. What blocks others coming to an experience of selflessness is their experience of sin, often unperceived. The task of Paul and other apostles in exposing what is wrong is a direct cause of suffering to them and very clearly connects them with the suffering that came on Jesus as he gave the same witness.
And the counter to this suffering:
Now, having the intimate knowledge of good and evil, humankind can freely choose to do God’s will, no longer a child needing the guidance of the law, truly adult, sharing God’s responsibility for the whole of what is created. This is the ‘inheritance’ to which Paul looks forward. This is an important counter to the picture of suffering.
A further paralles that I can see is that it is not possible for anyone to extricate himself fully from this ‘slavery’ - he needs the guidance of someone who has already left living ‘in the world’ and who SEES:
The nature of our identification with separate fleshly existence means that a change cannot be effected from within. An external act is needed.
The slave cannot see his own imprisonment, and/ or the way out of it (reminds me of the saying, that ‘if the pupil is ready, the teacher will apear’):
Here is a creature – a part of creation – that can act as God acts. But so complete has been the identification of humankind with separate fleshly existence that there is a consequent blindness affecting all human perception and colouring all human actions. Working from within this identification with what is created there is no way out. Human life without sin is inconceivable; sin will only end with the destruction of humankind. What Paul does is present Jesus as one who is sent from outside this circle of selfishness whose death is essential to bringing about a shift in human perception such that this new creation can happen. This shift in perception is so powerful according to Paul that it enables humankind to consistently do what is right but now in full knowledge of good and evil – now truly the image of God.
So it was enough for one person (Eve) to get us humans all kicked out of the Garden of Eden (the fall), but it is the action of one person again that will liberate all of humankind.
Again, reading this book was a pleasure and has given me another aspect of divinity, that was missing before.
It takes a real effort to not blow right through it, to slow down and let each point fully soak in. Magnificent!
