The Absence of Pre-Fall Patriarchy in Genesis 1
If Patriarchy was a Pre-Fall reality, then it would be at least implicit within the biblical text. I previously demonstrated that the 2ndcreation account (in Genesis 2) does not support such a reading, but I said nothing at the time regarding the 1st creation account in Genesis 1.
Genesis 1:26-28 describes the creation of humanity “in the image of God” and after his “likeness.” There are a number of hermeneutical and theological difficulties related to these phrases - particularly what exactly it means to be created in God’s image and how that relates to the phrase about “according to our likeness.” Couple those things also with the use of plural pronouns and you’ve got a longstanding theological and exegetical argument.
What I want to demonstrate in this post is that the *structure* of the pericope provides us insight into the author’s intention –that is, the way he formulates the narrative gives us insight into what he means by the mysterious phrases. More to the point, though, when we see what he means, we are also given insight into the Pre-Fall relationship between the man and the woman - one which, as I will demonstrate, is one of equality, not patriarchy. This argument will, in effect,support my reading of Genesis 2 and 3 which says that Patriarchy is a result of the Fall, not prior to it.
The Hebrew text in 1:27 reads something like this….(the word order is important – often skewed by our English translations)
“Created God humanity in His image. In the image of God He created him. Male and female He created them.”
Structurally, the text is a Chiasm (an inverted parallelism) followed by a straight forward Parallelism. Notice the Chiasm 1st…
- Created humanity
B God
C In His image
C’ In the image
B’ of God
A’ He created him
Surrounding the whole things is the Creative purposes of God. Central to the chiasm, and thus the emphasis of the writer, is the Image of God. Unfortunately, besides the fact that it is the creative act of God, no other exegetical clue is provided for us to help us discern the substance of the Image of God…..that is, until the parallelism which begins with the 2nd half of the chiasm:
- In the Image of God B. He created C. Him
A. Male and Female B. He created C. Them
What the structuring of this narrative suggests, then, is that whatever it means to be in the image of God, it must be fully understood in the context of BOTH male and femaleness. Man is not the image of God without woman and woman is not the image of God without the man. They are both, together the image of God. In other words – what the chiastic structure gives emphasis to (the image of God), the parallelism gives substance to (male and female).
Now notice that there is no implied subordination within this structuring. Rather, there is implied equality. Nothing within this text points to male headship. The Biblical Complementarian argument fails to account for the fact that this first creation account doesn’t even have a creation order for the genders. This narrative suggests that male and female are equal before God – for they both, together, stand before Him and are equally created in His image – so much for the old discussions about whether women were really created in God’s image or not.
The Spirit is Not the Marlboro Man
The Enlightenment, autonomous individual, that rugged, Marlboro man who needs nothing but his own cigarettes and skepticism, has fallen on tough times. To some extent[1] Postmodernity is the driving force of decay, falsifying our sense of self and reviving the idea that humans find their truest identity within community. I’m skeptical of what kind of community can ultimately be produced under a postmodern worldview, but whatever the case we can at least rejoice in the resurgence of the old axiom, “No man is an island.”
So it is with the Spirit: The Spirit of God is not an autonomous self. The Spirit finds identity within two communities: The community of the Trinity and the community of Ecclesia – the church. Ever longing to bring these two communities into union, the Spirit actively comes forth from the Father in wooing joy, enjoining the church to greater participation in the divine nature.
Trinitarian Community
The biblical picture of the Spirit is divine power and life. Within the Trinitarian community, the Spirit as power and life is the means by which the persons of the Trinity love one another. In Augustine’s terms, as cited earlier, the Spirit is the “bond of love” within the Trinitarian dance.
As the bond of love, the Spirit is seen here in terms of relationality. The Spirit relates to and submits to the other persons of the Trinity without losing individuality and identity. The community is not forced upon the Spirit in the sense of overshadowing the Spirit as an individual person. But neither is the individual person of the Spirit the primary concern overriding the community. Within the Trinitarian community there is a dance of love whereby each member sacrificially loves the others and places the others above themselves. This is essential to the nature of God and therefore to the nature of the Spirit.
Community of Ecclesia[2]
The Spirit is not restricted to heavenly relationships, but has willfully and ecstatically chosen to participate in the human community we call the church.[3] “Spirit brings persons together in heaven and on earth, being both the medium of the communication of Jesus with the Father and the medium of our communication with brothers and sisters.”[4]
The Spirit is the bond of love between the church and her savior. She sweeps the church up in her arms, carrying us to the Father, urging us to further sanctification, and all the while liberally lavishing on us the love of our Lord.
Yet the Spirit is not merely a force pushing us to God; the Spirit leads us with a chord of gentleness and compassion, convicting us when we fall behind, bestowing grace on us when we fail, and grieving with us when we mourn.
Furthermore, the relationship of the Spirit to the church is not just vertically oriented. The Spirit moves us to further union with our brothers and sisters in Christ. The Spirit works amongst Calvinists and Arminians, Complementarians and Egalitarians precisely because none of these systems can fully conceptualize Ruach. The wind cannot be constrained in our canisters of theological conjecture.
The love of the Trinitarian community was perfect before the Creation. Yet that perfect love desired (did not need) someone to share its love with. God created humanity and called out Israel and then the church as the object of His affection. God desires to draw us, through the Spirit, into that Trinitarian dance of love whereby there is mutual submission and communion. The Spirit is the church’s answer to its individualism and self-focus by wooing us to participation in Trinitarian love. We were “created in the first place to reflect God’s own perfection, and [our] destiny is to participate in the very life of God.”[5]
[1] I qualify this statement because there are aspects of Postmodernity which cling ferociously to the myth of the autonomous individual. So, it is neither the final answer nor is it the only challenge to individualism.
[2] I hope to expand on these thoughts later, so excuse what is left out in this brief rundown.
[3] Let me add at this point that I do not think the Spirit is restricted to Ecclesia either. But I will spell that out in a later post.
[4] Clark Pinnock, Flame of Love. 39.
[5] Pinnock, 41.
The Person of the Spirit: Emotion
Persons have emotions. Even unborn babies respond emotionally to certain stimuli. But when we think of the Holy Spirit we don’t think of a person, we think of a force or energy. This is largely because, in our minds, the Spirit does not have emotion.
We don’t think the Spirit has emotions for two reasons. First, on a popular level, we simply do not read our Bible’s close enough. Our preconceptions of the Spirit as a force and shadowy ghost color our ability to see those texts which speak of the Spirit’s emotion. Second, on a more academic level, Classical theism has, since Augustine, argued that God does not really have emotions. That is, all those texts which speak of God being angry, or happy, or regretful are anthropopathic: primarily human passions or emotions cast on God. God does not really feel anger, in Classical theism, “anger” is just a human way of explaining certain theological realities.
This is largely because in Classical theism God cannot change. Having a vast array of emotions leaves open the possibility of changing from one to another. God is perfect and any change from perfection is imperfection. Since emotions require change, this would necessitate that God moves about in various levels of imperfection.
To me, this betrays more of a Platonic view of perfection than a biblical view of perfection. For Plato, for everything on earth there was a perfect heavenly reality. The earthly things could change, fade, improve or destruct, but the heavenly reality would remain perfectly changeless. Augustine, taking this idea, placed it upon God – God, the ultimate heavenly being, cannot change. And if God cannot change, then God cannot feel real emotion b/c that necessitates change.
The biblical view of God, one that is more Hebraic than Greek,[1] is that God is not Immutable (that is unchanging). Rather God can change and still be perfect. Perfection does not require changelessness according to the Bible and genuine personhood necessitates emotion and thus, change.
There are many Scriptures that people use to prove that God does not change. They are all similar to “God is the same yesterday, today and forever.” What these texts really demonstrate, however, is not that God doesn’t change or have emotion, but that, from a faithfulness perspective, God will honor His covenants. When he makes a promise, you can be guaranteed that He will keep it. His character does not change, even if His emotions do.
That said, allowing God to have emotions is important in this discussion because for us to recover a notion of the Spirit as a living person, we must recover the Spirit’s emotions.
Just a quick list of the Spirit’s emotions should suffice for now:
Deep Agony: Ephesians 4:25-32. Compare with Christ in Matt. 26:37, where the same word is employed to describe Christ’s agony during the Passion.
Intense Desire/Jealousy: James 4:5. This is also Paul’s word for a longing to see someone whom he has been separated from.
Groaning that demonstrates solidarity with out weaknesses: Romans 8:26
Insult or outraged: Hebrews 10:29. The word here is a hapaxlegomena, so the exactly meaning is ambiguous. But either translation communicates emotion.
Ability to participate in loving union/fellowship: Philippians 2:1.
Desires that war against the flesh: Galatians 5:17
Love: Romans 15:30.
Let us not shackle the Holy Spirit by our theological presuppositions or our inattention to biblical texts. Viewed in light of good biblical exegesis, the Spirit is a person who expressed genuine emotion. I know our “assumptions about what is ‘proper’ for the divine nature to be like can make it difficult for us to take seriously what God’s nature is like as revealed in the gospel.”[2] But let us make an effort to see Spirit as revealed in Scripture: emotions, change and all.
[1] I’m not bashing Greek philosophy here! I’m just critiquing it. There are many great ideas in Christian theology (such as the Trinity) that we have formulated using the tools of Greek philosophy.
[2] Clark H. Pinnock, Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit. (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 1996), 31.
Experiencing the Spirit
A few months ago I wrote a post charging myself with being Too Skeptical for the Holy Spirit. I lamented, really, the fact that my Pneumatological Hermeneutic of Suspicion is always in over-drive. A few weeks later I wrote a post delineating those Christian beliefs I considered Dogma, Doctrine, Opinion or Heresy. Theotica pointed out that my Dogmas (those things I considered essential to the Christian faith) were overwhelmingly Christological. I realized, in frustration with myself, I had very little to say about the Holy Spirit.
A Hermeneutic of Suspicion is not entirely responsible for this. My tradition (Evangelical/Southern Baptist) rarely touches on the 3rd person of the Trinity. It’s hard to develop a thoughtful theology when there’s no consistency within the community’s rhetoric.
Our communal avoidance of the Spirit is borne out of at least two factors: 1. we are afraid allowing the Spirit to have control will turn us into Pentecostals,[1] and 2. our view of the Bible restricts our Pneumatological experiences.
Let me explain the second point.
I’ve always loved the authoritative emphasis Evangelicalism places on the Bible. While in certain respects I have no problem with this, I also feel it has led to an unfortunate dichotomy between the Scripture and experience; a dichotomy which is, itself, not scriptural.
John Stott argues in his discussion on the Holy Spirit, “God’s purpose for our lives is to be found in Scripture and not in experience.”[2] Stott argues the Holy Bible, above our experiences of the Holy Spirit, should direct our Christian lives. He says this primarily because he distrusts experience, not because he distrusts the Holy Spirit. The Bible must be the medium of the Holy Spirit.
But here’s the fundamental flaw: All our experiences of the Spirit, including the illumination given by the Spirit to understand the Bible, are still experiences. As Ruether says, “Human experience is both the starting point and ending point of the circle of interpretation.”[3] There’s nothing outside of experience (or the text!). This distrust of experience is an epistemological left over from the Enlightenment, not from a biblical worldview.
The problem with appealing only the Scriptures, and avoiding experience, is not only that everything is an experience, but the Bible only Speaks of experiencing the Spirit. Experience is how the biblical authors knew the Spirit. They didn’t have a Bible on which to rely.
The Luke-Acts narratives, for example, spill over with experiences of the Spirit’s outpouring. Furthermore, Paul appeals to his audience, not to only search the Scriptures (the Old Testament) for their awareness of the Spirit, but to look within their own communal experiences for evidence of the Spirit’s work:
What, don’t you know that your bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit?
Or
If there is any consolation in Christ, any comfort from His love, any fellowship of the Spirit, then make my joy complete…
Indeed, some of Paul’s statements only make sense with the assumption that his churches experience the Spirit: Did you receive the Spirit by works of Torah or by believing what you heard? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now trying to gain perfection by the flesh? (Gal. 3:2-3). His question only works because of the experiential quality of their reception of the Spirit.[4]
Paul assumes his audience will acknowledge, from experience, the Spirit’s work among them. Paul is no Enlightenment scholar suspicious of experiencing the Spirit. He see’s the Spirit at work in his churches, in his mission, and in his life. This is no subjective reality to Paul: don’t you know!
By placing the Bible above the Holy Spirit, we’ve in essence claimed the Bible is objective and public knowledge and the Spirit’s activities are subjective and private. In this, we’ve not only violated our Scriptural foundation, but we’ve denied the 3rd person of the Trinity out of a preconceived, prefabricated, position of suspicion. For all our arguments about the Historical Jesus, maybe we need to reexamine the ways we’ve abandoned the Historical Spirit.
Part of the churches New Covenant is that the Spirit of God will personally abide with the people of God. This is not an abstract doctrine waiting to be delineated; it is an experience – an experience of a person. When the church gathers, God is present in person.[5] Until we regain this personal, relational, experiential aspect of the Spirit, our churches will continue subject themselves to Enlightenment philosophy instead of the biblical worldview we claim we posses.
The person of the Holy Spirit, not the Bible, is the down-payment of God’s eschatological promises (Eph. 1:14). The Spirit in our midst reminds us that God has already purchased his church and the victory is already won. Christians ought to be the most hopeful of all people for we have the Spirit in our midst reminding us that God has already defeated sin and death. By our failure to experience the Spirit in our midst, we are robbed of that personal assurance.
In the end, this is what I wanted to communicate:
- Everything is an experience. You cannot avoid experience in your theological, biblical or, especially, your pneumatological reflection.
- Our fear of experience not only betrays an Enlightenment epistemology as opposed to a Biblical one, but straight-jackets the Holy Spirit – indeed, probably even grieves the Spirit.
- Paul’s assumption is that the Spirit is experienced by his churches. In contrast to Paul’s churches, I doubt many evangelicals could say, “Yes, Paul, we know from experience that we have fellowship with the Spirit; we know from experience that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit.” This is a major flaw in not only our Pneumatology but also our Ecclesiology.
[1] The SBC even has a restriction on its missionaries – if a person has ever spoken in a “prayer language” they are disqualified from missions work
[2] Quoted by Walter Kaiser, “The Baptism in the Holy Spirit as the Promise of the Father: A Reformed Perspective. Perspectives on Spirit Baptism: 5 Views. Ed. Chad Owen (Nashville: Broadman and Holeman, 2004), 15.
[3] Rosemary Radford Ruether, Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. Ed. Letty M. Russel Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1985.
[4] Gordon Fee, Paul, the Spirit and the People of God. (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1996), 87.
[5] I suppose the pragmatic denial of the Spirit’s fundamental personhood is another reason my tradition doesn’t trust Spirit experiences.
What’s in a Name: Thoughts on the Personhood of the Spirit
It is difficult for Western Christians to conceive the Spirit as person and not merely a force or energy. Persons generally at least have names, gender, and emotion, after all. On one level, the Spirit seems to have none of these. The problem is exacerbated when we read Augustine and he speaks of the Spirit as the “bond of love between the Father and the Son.” It is not so much that Augustine is wrong here, but by describing the Spirit this manner robs the Spirit of personhood in favor of function. Influential as Augustine is in Western Christianity, this depersonalization has ravaged our pneumatology.
Though there are many things that make up personhood. In the next few posts I wish to engage the name, the gender, community and the emotions of the Spirit. The goal is to begin building a more complete and functional understanding of the Spirits nature as a person.
To an ancient Jew a person’s name provided information concerning the person’s character. To know someone’s name, was to know who they are and what they’re about. It was more than just information used to catalogue someone in their mind as differentiated from another person. A person’s name was identical to the person.
The difficulty with understanding the Spirit as a person is that Spirit isn’t exactly a name. The Father’s name is Yahweh, the Son’s name is Jesus, but the Spirit seems to lack a name. And without this identifier we are stuck with thinking of the Spirit, not as a person, but an impersonal force. This misconception simply won’t do. In order to move past it, we need to understand that the Spirit does, indeed, have a name: Ruach.
Like its Greek counterpart, Pneuma, Ruach has a plethora of meanings ranging from a light breeze to breath, or even a fierce wind. We must understand from the outset that ancient Jews did not draw a sharp distinction between Spirit and wind; indeed, we need to appreciate the fact that “wherever we read ‘wind’ in the Scripture, people of biblical times also understood ‘spirit,’ and wherever we read ‘spirit,’ they also understood ‘wind.’”[1] The symbol and the signifier are interconnected.
So, if the importance knowing the Spirit’s name lies in understanding the core of the Spirit as a person, then what does the name Ruach (wind or breath) tell us about the Spirit?
First, Ruach informs us that, like a natural wind, the Spirit cannot be tamed. The Spirit is free from the box of any particular cultural construal. The Spirit transcends and supersedes all our finite conceptions. To yoke the Spirit would be like taming the wind: if the wind were tamed it would no longer be wind, it would be dead and lifeless air. To bottle up the Spirit for one’s political or social agenda is impossible. In our attempts to do so, we inevitably demonstrate that it is not the Spirit we have caged with our ideological agendas, but an idol forged in our image. We cannot tame Ruach.
Second, Ruach, like breath, communicates life. The Spirit gives the breath of life not only to human beings but to the entire cosmos. This breath demonstrates that the Spirit’s concern extends beyond our human interests to the whole of creation. Indeed, just as the Spirit breathed life into the first creatures in Genesis, so too the Spirit longs to breathe new life into a redeemed world, not just redeemed human beings.
Furthermore, the Spirit breathes life into the church. The church does not survive on her own efforts or energies. For all our scheming, planning, and strategizing, this is not how the church perseveres in life. Our identity is not wrapped up in programs or number of baptisms; our identity is rooted in the life giving breath of the Spirit. Neither the church nor the individual Christian life is sustainable through suffocating programs and agendas which inhibit our breathing the fresh air of God’s Spirit.
Third, the name Ruach, like breath, communicates intimacy. “Breath is that which is most ‘inward’ and intimate, most vital and personal to a human being.”[2] It is through the Spirit that the church has intimate fellowship with the Father (Eph. 2:18-22). “We know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.” (I John 4:13) Just as the Spirit was Jesus’ “inseparable companion,”[3] so too the Spirit is warmly present. When we are lonely or infirm, the Spirit is there when no one else it. The Spirit groans on our behalf, knowing that our sufferings are but a momentary affliction that the Triune God longs to redeem.
Finally, when we add the word Holy before Spirit, we recognize the non-triviality with which we approach Ruach. Ruach is not like you and I. Holiness does not merely describe the moral quality of Ruach, it describes Ruach’s very being. Holiness is an essential ontological attribute to the Spirit. Being in the presence of Ruach is to be in the presence of the holy. This does more than just make the hair on the back of our neck stand up. The holy is frightening and terrible. To be in the presence of a person who knows us so intimately (all our secrets, all our failures, all our high-handed sins), a person who could, like a fierce wind, cast us away, a person who cannot be bridled by our agendas; to be in this person’s presence is fearful. Indeed, the presence of the Holy Spirit is “disturbing, upsetting, and awe-ful.”[4] I do believe that love is God’s central attribute. But that love is Holy Love.
A name is a symbol that creates worlds. By recognizing the Spirit’s name, we are invited into a world of gentles breezes and fierce storms. While only goodness can be found in this name, there remains nothing safe about the Holy Spirit. Transcendent but immanent, tangible yet holy, the tension is purposeful in the symbolic world created and sustained by the name Ruach.
[1] Raniero Cantalamessa, Come Creator Spirit: Meditations on the Veni Creator. (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1999), 8.
[2] Canatalamessa, 10.
[3] Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit. XVI.39, 32.140C.
[4] Bernhard Anderson, Contours of Old Testament Theology. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 45.
