Sacramental Living

This is the third part of a continuing post. Read Part 2 here.  Read Part 1 here.

WARNING: Academic content ahead …

This one way of torah is called “the way of the righteous” (Psalm 1.6).  The way–derek–is the “means by which one lives and moves and has one’s being.”[1] By negation in verse 1, it can be assumed that the righteous are to walk, stand, and sit somewhere.  But if the way does not lie with the wicked, or sinners, or scoffers, then where?  The location must be an all-consuming place of completion.  This is suggestive by the attempts of the psalmist at completion: “walk,” “stand,” “sit;” “day,” “night.”[2] The derek metaphor, and its synonym ‘orach–‘path’–, are pervasive throughout the Psalter.  Psalm 1 is brilliantly making a match between torah and derek. 

Torah is the one way, the one path, for the righteous who would live life in delight.  The preponderance of laments in the Psalter would seem to squelch this delight of living life in the path of torah.  Yet, the delight is not so much a happy outlook, but rather an assurance that life is contained within the life of YHWH.  The dichotomy of either/or melts away.  God makes room in his life for much struggle, pain, grief, anger, and fatigue while the righteous journey on the pathway.  Co-mingling with torah as the pathway there can be this paradox, because of the concept of ‘refuge.’

‘Refuge’ does not appear in Psalm 1, many might declaim.  Indeed.  However, here we find the link from the pathway of torah in the first Psalm to ‘seek refuge’–chaseh–in Psalm 2.  The link is nestled in the last two verses:

Serve Yahweh with awe; reverence and worship him, or he will grow angry, and you will die in the way; for his consuming fire quickly kindles.  Happy are all who seek refuge in him.  (Psalm 2.11-12 orig. trans.)

Chaseh is the verbal form of mahseh.  That the verbal and not the nominal form appears in Psalm 2 connecting the idea of pathway is significant.  This is the major point of departure for the present work from current study on metaphor in the Psalter.[3] The idea of chaseh is to be active within refuge: “Happy are all who are refuging in YHWH.”  Such a verb-ifying of the noun ‘refuge’ seems to render the most accurate understanding of the Psalter’s intent in assigning Psalms 1 and 2 as prelude to the Psalms.  Thus, God is not a static, impassable being that is the goal of seekers longing for refuge.  Torah does not serve as simply a direction toward God-as-refuge implying “destination and permanent residence.”[4]

In sum, there is a way.  That way is the one way.  It is a pathway called torah.  The righteous are those who delight in the story of God that YHWH has initiated and invited all to be active participants in.  Much activity takes place within this story.  The story is a journey wherein worshippers are seeking refuge–‘refuging’–in the openness of YHWH’s life.

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[1] William P. Brown, Seeing the Psalms (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002),32. The remainder of this discussion concerning ‘pathway’ is heavily dependent on Brown, 31-53.  Though major differences will be spelled out here, Brown has done significant work in linking the metaphors of torah and derek.

[2] James L. Crenshaw, The Psalms: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 58.

[3] Particularly see Brown, Seeing the Psalms,18-53.

[4] Ibid., 32.

SO TELL ME SOMETHING:

Do you see the verbage playing out this way?

——

Brian Niece
www.brianniece.com
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WARNING:  Theological content straight ahead …

This is Part 2 of an ongoing post.  Read Part 1 here.

There are three seemingly simple, yet particularly interesting, characteristics of God’s creative revelation–all introduced in the first three verses of Genesis–that fuel the imagination concerning the context of the “source and foundation of the meaning discerned within Israel’s history.”[1] The introductory phrase, the tohu webohu –the emptiness, shapelessness–and God’s first creative acts of speaking things into existence are remarkable and distinctive features of this narrative that creates meaning for all existence.  We will take a systems approach with these three aspects: looking at the whole and then moving to the parts.

The widely held translation of the opening phrase of Genesis–”In the beginning, God created”–along with a largely superficial understanding of the “formless void” of verse 1 and that we are told God created the heavens in the earth in verse 1 has yielded the theological concept creatio ex nihilo, that is the doctrine that states the world was created out of nothing.  A close reading of the text casts doubt on this doctrine.  In fact, it is unlikely such an idea occurs anywhere in the Old Testament.[2]

The challenge is: how could God create out of nothing if something–the “formless void”–was there?   The ‘nothing’ might be a void or chaos.  If a void, this would have affinities with theologies that emphasize grace, but “have the indirect effect of denying the moral and interactive character of God’s grace.”[3] Such theologies would rather have the nothingness be chaos, and attempts to find distinct and striking parallels between the Genesis creation story and the Enuma Elish.[4] The Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation epic, bears similarities in Near Eastern language and comprehension–i.e., Tiamat (sea) and tehom (the deep)–to the Genesis account, but these similarities are suggestive of a Near Eastern cultural understanding of the world and not of an account that is quite close to the Enuma elish.

The opening chapters of the Hebrew Bible evidence a difference in philosophy of language.  We see a juxtaposition of culturally scientific language and poetically expressive language, or what has been called mythopoeic language.  It is with this expressive language of mystery that the poet of Genesis tells a story of the Creator-God who does not struggle with the pre-existent chaos.  Rather, his ordering of the heavens and the earth–of reality–is done at first with words.  God speaks, and it is.  The chaos is ordered.

For the Hebrew people, a narrative of the first things would include elements of the present and the future, laced with the understanding of what life is like at present and musings on what humanity will do with this life.  Always in the forefront of Hebraic thought would be the participation of God in the people’s doing of life.

This yields a beautiful coherency that is absurdly interrupted by any traditional understanding of creation ex nihilo.  Chaos exists; it simply is.  As it was at the first, so it is now.  Something of present life for the poet is reflected back into the Genesis account.

The nothingness of the tohu webohu is not the only substantive that is, however.  There is something behind the nothing.  That something speaks light into the darkness of the nothingness.  That something speaks separation of the chaos and orders the chaotic waters.  That something speaks stable dry land into existence, and life to cover the land, and varying lights for seasons, and living beings to be co-participants in the creation process within the created order.  Then God finally creates his own image–one of diversity within unity–as minister to this created order: a risky venture indeed.  The entire unfolding of this creation narrative, though bearing some affinities to other Near Eastern creation accounts, is marked with newness and imagination.

The idea of newness can be further illuminated by a closer reading of the opening line in Genesis:

With first things God created the heavens and the earth. (Gen. 1.1 orig. trans.)

Unlike Marduk who must struggle with Tiamat–and that only after many lesser gods have battled and failed miserably against her– the Creator-God of Genesis simply speaks the nothingness into order.  There is no epic struggle, nor is there any weakening of the chaos from lesser Gods.  This is indeed a ‘first thing;’ a first of many acts this God performs that are new.  The prophet of 2 Isaiah notices this pattern of newness in YHWH God:

As of now, I announce to you new things,

Well-guarded secrets you did not now.

Only now are they created, and not of old;

Before today you had not heard of them.

(Isaiah 48.6b-7a)

Likewise the prophet of tearing down and building up wildly–and truthfully–imagined when declaring to the harlot Israel whom God had just declared a virgin anew:

How long will you waver, O faithless daughter?  For the LORD has created a new thing on the earth: a virgin births a man.  (Jeremiah 31.22 orig. trans.)

In this creation, God has not annihilated the primordial chaos.  Rather he has transformed it.  Out of nothing, something emerges.  This word-fulfilling action is worthy of Israel’s praise.  This is why YHWH’s historical deeds are regarded as creative acts. YHWH creates a people out of slavery and out of exile.

The coherency of thought that has its genesis in Genesis ties together the often segregated theological categories of creation, redemption, and transformation.  Violence of a categorical kind must occur to some degree in order to grasp the nuance of these activities of our God who is always ‘beyond.’  Yet, there flows a river of cogency that washes away our conceptions of sterile classification when we see this Creator-God YHWH ever moving those who respond to his grace from creation to new creation.  This fluency melts the dividing lines of the God who creates from the God who redeems from the God who transforms.

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[1] Bernard W. Anderson, From Creation to New Creation: Old Testament Perspectives (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 4.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), xxvii.

[4] Here, the Genesis creation story referred to is that of Genesis 1.1-2.3.  Though some scholars understand the opening chapters of Genesis to be comprised of separate creation stories, I find them to be one coherent creation story, expounding or showing us new angles of only one account.

[5] The preposition bĕ is just this: a porous Hebrew preposition.  Scholarship takes the translation of bĕ to be determined by grammatical context.  Since it could be translated “with, to, in, about” or as a number of other prepositional possibilities, strict adherence to “in” is unnecessary and misleading.

SO TELL ME SOMETHING:
What’s your take on creation ex nihilo?

——

Brian Niece
www.brianniece.com
If you enjoyed this post, get free updates by email or RSS.

This is the second part of a continuing post.  Read Part 1 here.

The “one way” is introduced in Psalm 1 indirectly as a negative statement concerning the “path that sinners tread” (v.1).  In other words, the one way is the ‘not’ toward the “[h]appy are those” in verse 1.  Happiness through “delight . . . in the torah of the LORD” (v.1).  Notice that delight does not come from, out of, beside, nor any other host of prepositional possibilities in relation to torah; rather delight is found ‘in’ torah.  To this concept of placement ‘in’ torah we shall return.

Many English translations of Psalm 1 generate sterile understandings and limited scope for the meaning of torah.  Later-day Christianity succinctly refers to torah as the law, or the Old Covenant.  Yet, after reading Psalm 1 (and subsequently Psalm 19 and Psalm 119) certainly law cannot be the exhaustive meaning of torah.  Indeed Hans-Joachim Kraus states that “[u]nder no circumstances should we translate torah as ‘law,’ or introduce a corresponding understanding in legalistic terms.”[1] Kraus proposes ‘instruction’ as a fuller understanding of torah suggesting this gives the “impression of something living, dynamic.”[2] But semantics becomes a brain-numbing exercise at this level when ‘law’ and ‘instruction’ can be considered so vastly divergent in connotation.  Indeed, instruction hardly gives any indication of a living or dynamic understanding as relayed in the text of Psalm 1.  Here torah is likened to a living and active stream giving human life wholeness.  What understanding of torah would feed such a lively metaphor?

Torah is arguably the most important part of the Tanakh, because it is the written record of YHWH’s self-revelation as the God of all creation to a peculiar Hebrew people.[3] Indeed, torah is a narrative–a story–of God’s covenantal relationship with a particular people in space and time.  It is this sweeping, almost cosmic, defining of torah that gives the Psalter liberty to implement such playful imagery concerning YHWH’s story.  And indeed, torah is clearly situated as emanating from YHWH and generated by his initiative, not simply a story about YHWH.  This is how delight can come from being ‘in torah.’  When a community finds itself involved in YHWH’s story, there is delight, there is happiness because life is occurring as it was intended from the mind of God.

Now, we must wonder: what does a people do who find themselves in torah?  Verse 2 continues: “on torah they meditate day and night.”  The verb hagah here translated as “meditate” is elsewhere translated differently: “As a lion or a young lion growls over its prey . . .” (Isaiah 31.4).  There is something visceral and vocal to this meditation.  The Hebraic understanding of hagah is rooted in communal worship.  The holy din of worshippers singing and chanting psalms in the ancient temple feeds the connotations of hagah.[4] Meditation then is not some isolated mental exercise, nor a closet spiritual experience.  To be swept into torah–YHWH’s story–means to fully and actively rehearse that story in community fashion at all times, because the “streams of water” (Psalm 1.3) are continually flowing.  Thus, there is no time for the “happy” to consider following the “path that sinners tread.”  Instead, hagah must be constant and ongoing.  This conceptual reality of torah implies movement over against stasis.  Life in torah is a journey, not a destination.  There must be much room in YHWH’s story to move about for so many happy ones to take delight and be always on the move.  Life is decisive because of YHWH’s story.  The gifting of this story to humanity generates the Psalter’s confidence that “torah is the only thinkable response”[5] and the one way in which to journey and live life.  If torah is “all-embracing in its scope,”[6] there is no dichotomy of equal and opposite opportunity in Psalm 1.

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[1] Hans-Joachim Kraus, Theology of the Psalms, trans. Keith Crim (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1986), 34.

[2] Ibid.

[3] The first five books of the Hebrew Bible are similar in structure to the five-fold division of the Psalter, thus Psalm 1 is claiming that the Psalter is a reflection of Torah.

[4] See James Limburg, Psalms (Lousiville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 2ff.

[5] Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984), 39.

[6] William P. Brown, Seeing the Psalms (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 57.