Reading Abraham

Discussion Summaries: Genesis 12 - Abraham 5

2008-03-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

Genesis 12

- the imperfect tense in Gen 12.1 ("Now the Lord had said unto Abram . . . ") indicates that God's call, though textually contiguous with the death of Terah, preceded these events in some way; does the tense indicate an immemorial or metahistorical dimension to God's call? the call has always already preceded whatever historical events take shape in light of it?

- Abram is promised the very thing that the tower of Babel builders wanted (a name that would last), but he is promised it by the very means that denied it to the tower-builders (a scattering from family and homeland) (Gen 11.4, 12.2)

- does the scattering of languages open or close the possibility of theology?

- what are the implications of Abram's silent obedience in response to God's command? can such silence constitute a kind of theology?

- God's first words to Abram (Gen 12.1) command him to leave his family and homeland

- textually, God speaks to Abram out of the void of his father's death (Gen 12.1); does this insertion of God into the line imply a break with patriarchy? if so, what are its effects?

- the patriarchal lineage (through Terah) appears to already be sputtering and disrupted before God's command comes (Gen 11.26, 28, 31)

Genesis 13-14

- Abraham is portrayed typologically as the first to move from Egypt to the promised land, Canaan. (Gen. 13)

- The faithful must flee the world for the promised land, though on arriving they will not find the “Garden of Eden/idol” they fantasized about. They will find place where their work can begin anew.

- Abraham appears to work out the theological meaning of God’s commands existentially (in practice) rather than discursively and it is relatively clear that he does not know the meaning of his interpretive actions in advance.

- In addressing the role of family, the centrality of Abraham’s relation to Lot must be taken into account.

- Does Lot function as a placeholder for the patriarchal order that God interrupted by commanding Abraham to leave home, family, country? Does Melchizedek – without father or mother – embody the divinely non-patriarchal order? The first priest in the Genesis being the first person without any lineage?

- Abraham’s family commitments (i.e., to Lot) plunge him into politics and warfare, though on the basis of such a commitment his political actions are marked by an excessive generosity.

- Does Lot have a choice to not settle outside the promised land? It appears that the land cannot support both Lot and Abraham.

Genesis 15

- Is a faithful relation to God mediated or immediate? how does one or the other of these choices effect faith, doubt, knowledge, etc. (i.e., the structure of the relationship)?

- Why does the covenant keep getting repeated? Must it be continually re-made?

- God responds to Abraham’s doubt with a miraculous display of power, but this display doesn’t stick (it only temporarily relieves doubt); does this failure of the sensible image (however spectacular and powerful) imply the necessity of a symbolic supplement (words/texts/promises)?

- Following Melchizedek’s priestly mediation of tithes, Abraham has his first dialogue with God.

- Gen. 15.1 introduces the locution: “the word of the Lord” came to Abram; post-Melchizedek, the relation is mediated by the word? This newly symbolic dimension to the relationship allows for doubt and dialogue rather than simple, mute compliance?

- This re-capitulation of the covenant includes, for the first time, metaphor and metonymy. Is there a connection between the rhetoric and the change in the nature of the relationship? (Dust and stars as metonyms of earth and heaven; dust and stars as metaphors for posterity.)

- Is the substitutionary logic of metaphor an additional interruption of the patriline?

- The starry heavens: the immanent appearance of the immemorial/non-historical, the eternal stars as what circles above the earth/the historical and literally give time (day/night, seasons, etc.)?

- The confusion of day and night in this chapter indicates that the events do not belong to the ordinary run of time?

- The “cut” of the covenant is introduced; does this symbolic cut, the introduction of symbolic/metaphorical difference/substitution touch on the splitting of the subject’s own self-immediacy? The loss of immediacy in relation to God inducing a loss of immediacy in relation to oneself? Such a cut/split in subjectivity prompts fantasies of wholeness (the fantasies that are the substance of pride) and simultaneously leaves us potentially open to others if we do not withdraw behind fantasy in fear.

Genesis 16

- There are a series of notable parallels between Gen 16 and the Eden story: Abram hearkens to Sarai, Sarai takes Hagar and gives her to Abram, Sarai’s eyes are opened, Sarai can then have (vicarious) children

- other Eden parallels: the central role of shame, its connection to blame (16.2), a reflexivity of seeing and being seen, Hagar’s surprise at being seen by God without her destruction (shame as the inability to see the other’s gaze as other than destructively judgmental)

- Abram = Adam, Sarai = Eve, Hagar = fruit

- Sarai brings Hagar into the story as a substitute/metaphor for herself, a metaphor/surrogacy that changes/splits her relationship to herself?

- the difference between seeing and hearing in this chapter (and its peculiar emphasis on sight, on seeing, and on seeing oneself being seen)

- the importance of distinguishing contract from covenant; what is the difference? a difference in one’s relation to the symbolic, a relation which either includes or excludes the Real?

- faith takes place only in relation to the (impossibility) of the covenant rather than in relation to the (possibility) of the contract?

- Hagar’s inclusion is an attempt to “guarantee” rather than interrupt the patriline?

Genesis 17

- “walk before me . . .” (17.1), the first comprehensive commandment given to Abram; “. . . in my presence,” a life thoroughly conditioned by the Lord’s regard?

- the promise of being a king/queen of nations: does this promise still resonate with us? why would anyone want the trouble?

- contract vs. covenant: do we treat the excess of the contract as something that threatens to ruin it or as something that opens the very meaning of the contract itself? a contract supplemented with an avowed excess = a covenant?

- the excess of God’s unconditional commitment to the contract transforms it into a covenant?

- circumcision: indelibly associating reproduction with divine gifts

- the general commandment is vague and indistinct (17.1), but the prescriptions associated with circumcision are so precise and detailed (high-resolution descriptions)

- token : covenant :: signifier : signified; the token seems to be much richer in content that than the signified

- circumcision as symbolic castration: there will be a child, but only by God’s grace and power? a cut that literally interrupts the patriline? a cut that is a token shedding of blood?

- circumcision does not equal covenant: the whole household is circumcised, but only Abram receives a covenant

- fecundity: binding our concrete natural inclinations to infinite possibility?

Genesis 18

- the problem of the ethical ambiguity with which God is portrayed (e.g., Abraham’s negotiation)

- the parallel between Gen. 18 and Job (questioning God, “dust and ashes”): are these provocations meant to test and prove them?

- the unconditionality of the relationship renders it arbitrary or beyond ethics?

- an additional question here: is God impassive or passionate? can he be moved or swayed by the argument or is it a show?

- this chapter: the first time the promise is made conditional on some action

- Abraham must learn to act unconditionally in order for the unconditioned event / impossible child to arrive?

- the lack of clarity about the number of visitors (1? 3? 2?) and their status (God, angels, men?) is felicitous: Abraham, likewise not knowing, acts without regard to the answers offering hospitality unconditionally

- Abraham promises a modest meal and delivers a feast

- Abrahamic ethics: a hospitality that overflows obligation

- does Abraham here teach, at least implicitly, that there is some kind of moral standard independent of God, in relation to which God’s own actions might be measured?

- is the negotiation/dialogue a kind of rational/theological response to God?

- Abraham’s relation to God is very different from Sarai’s; there is no evidence of a “joint” relationship

Genesis 19

- There are a whole series of structural parallels between Gen. 18.1-8 and 19.1-3.

- Abraham promises little and provides a feast. Lot promises a feast and provided little.

- If Abraham's unconditional hospitality is the mark of his fidelity, then how do we distinguish it from Lot's own excessive hospitality in Gen. 19?

- Is Lot's hospitality counterfeit? If so, on what grounds?

- Possible answer: Lot is responding to men rather than God? Lot makes the offer of his own volition while Abraham acts only in response to an explicit command? Abraham meets the angels on their own terms, Lot brings them into the city on his terms? Abraham leads them into safety, Lot leads them into danger?

- Abraham gives perfectly, Lot gives imperfectly, and the Sodomites refuse to give

- Lot: an everyman, wanting to do the right thing but after doing it badly or wrongly?

- What does the text's general antipathy to the urban tell us about the politics?

- Lot's hospitality ends in the following chapters in incest: the mark of a complete dissolution of social structure

- What should we make of the JST's overturning of Lot's offer of his daughters to the mob?

Genesis 20-21

- Gen. 20 is about God's protection of Abraham when hospitality fails?

- the strong parallels between Gen 20 and 12.9-20; the earlier story is a foreshadowing of Israel's entrance, sojourn, and exodus from Egypt, is this one also?

- 20.7 is the only occurrence in Genesis of nabi, "prophet": why is Abraham described this way here?

- the events of this chapter make us realize that Abraham is not such a saint as we might have supposed, nor are all the inhabitants as depraved as those in Sodom

- why frame Gen 22 with a story of the fallible Abraham? In general, has our assessment of Abraham to this point been relatively negative?

- predicates that have been explicitly applied to Abraham over the course of the story to this point: old, son, father, prophet, wandered, stranger, servant, circumcised, husband, rich, Hebrew

- Abraham is the recipient of two gracious covenants with God and Abimelech; his exemplarity derives in each case from his response to the graciousness?

- Gen 21, the birth of the covenant child is the expulsion of the child of the handmaiden (we need to read these events as belonging together)

- covenant and promise do not appear to be the same: Isaac receives a covenant, Ishmael a promise; promise = I will bless you? covenant = I will bless you so that you may become a blessing to others?

- why doesn't Abraham's story end here with the birth of Isaac? many rhetorical figures indicate that the story has cycled through to its conclusion; can we proceed to the next generation only by enacting a kind of traumatic cut/break/fall? this is to ask: how does the eternal round of creation work? how do we understand the parallels between the "generations of the heavens and the earth" and the "generations of men"?

- Gen 21, the birth of the covenant child is the expulsion of the child of the handmaiden (we need to read these events as belonging together)

- covenant and promise do not appear to be the same: Isaac receives a covenant, Ishmael a promise; promise = I will bless you? covenant = I will bless you so that you may become a blessing to others?

- in the entire Genesis account of Abraham he is "old"; a uniquely Mormon understanding of Abraham will be an understanding of Abraham as other than "old"?

Genesis 22

- is hineni, "Here I am," the response of perfect fidelity? Does this response mark a culminating moment in Abraham's relation to Lord, moving from his originally mute response to God's call, to his doubting dialogue, to an affirmatively unconditional response?

- is Abraham's willingness to not "hold back" his son the core of hospitality? hospitality: a willingness to not hold anything in reserve but unconditionally consecrate everything?

- the repetition of the covenants in 22.16, 18 include a causal construction "X blessing because you have done Y"; possible readings: not a making conditional of the covenant but an acknowledgement of Abraham's unconditional commitment to the covenant that God has unconditionally extended to him, a recognition of Abraham's joint-partnership in a mutual unconditionality

- a complex pattern of "hearing" and "seeing" in this chapter; Abraham "hears" passively and "sees" actively? by hearing, Abraham is empowered to actively see? he
"listens" to what the Lord "sees"?

- what about the centrality of substitution/metaphor for the story?

- the chapter narrates a "double" slaughter in which God requires Abraham to relinquish both his sons

- this recognition of a double sacrifice highlights the human costs of an unconditional fidelity? Abraham must sacrifice not only Isaac, but his relationships with Ishmael and Sarah as well? he must willingly sacrifice these relationships for the sake of God's promises about these relationships?

- Abraham's two sons: two ways of constructing community, Ishmael as the willful construction of family/community, Isaac as the kenotic construction of family/community

- does this double loss of both Ishmael and Isaac connect with Mormon doctrines about the loss and risk inherent in the plan of salvation?

Genesis 22/23

- is to ask a question about Abraham as a model of fidelity necessarily to ask a question about typology? how ought we to think about typology?

- does the fact of the Genesis 23 (the fact that, after the akedah, the story STILL continues) recast the events in a new and/or less climatic light?

- it is Sarah’s death that finally leads to Abraham’s acquisition of a portion of the promised land; is this an additional trial? Abraham has to buy even the smallest plot of the promised land because none has been given to him, even for Sarah’s burial? is it a degradation of the covenant, a devolution into banal bargaining for the land? does Abraham have reason to want to “economize” Sarah’s death?

- is Sarah’s narratively contiguous death related to the akedah? even caused by it?

- typology requires us to turn our hearts to our fathers (the past type) and toward our children (the future antitype)? it binds generations together by abridging time?

- is to ask a question about Abraham as a model of fidelity necessarily to ask a question about typology? how ought we to think about typology?

- the question of the importance of the Book of Mormon’s/Jacob’s typological reading of the akedah

- some basic elements of typology? (1) an identification between two dissimilar things that elides the differences between the two (a commutative relationship?)? (2) a metaphorical identification structured by time, a space of time, a bridge the spans a temporal gap that produces a kind of temporal abridgment, a “folding” of the normal course of time in which two previously unrelated events are asserted as identical? (3) it is non-causal/linear fold that “re-sets” chains of causality in order to introduce something new and free and unconditioned? (4) the type is a kind of cipher capable of recoding the elements of an entire situation, a cipher rather than a symbol? (5) being faithful to God means being faithful to this typological realignment he means to enact?

- what of the difference between antitype and archetype? which are we talking about? what are the essential differences?

- typology requires us to turn our hearts to our fathers (the past type) and toward our children (the future antitype)? it binds generations together by abridging time?

- repentance, by creating something new, enacts the gift of freedom or agency

Abraham 1

- the most striking difference between Genesis and Abraham: the shift from an brisk, impersonal, third-person narrative to a detailed and self-conscious first-person narration?

- the shift in narrative style is exemplified in the shift toward explanation for why things are done (some Genesis is very short on)

- this shift is more “Mormon” because explanation and a discussion of priesthood “rights” is more works oriented and intelligible? de-emphasizing the mysterious, unconditional and unaccountable intervention of God?

- what do we do with the “Pharaoh” who is righteous and blessed but denied the priesthood?

- the deep connection between records + priesthood + family

- connection between the Word and priesthood and family: sealing is authorized giving of one’s Word

- is priesthood a way of “acting out” a typological relation?

- the opening verses set “my fathers” (the particular) over against “the fathers” (the universal) from whom the priesthood comes

- a different kind of relationship between God and Abraham: not the abject subject/Lord relation of Genesis

- the emphasis on “rights” may be a way of re-thinking grace rather than marginalizing it

-the rights in question are the rights of primogeniture

Abraham 2

- the image of Abraham pleading with God to have mercy on his father

- the problem of grace in the book of Abraham: perhaps the issue shifts in this book from receiving grace to giving grace? from receiving blessing to becoming a blessing? (e.g., 2.11)

- grace is received as grace only to the extent that it is given away graciously?

- this is the problem of the blessing of posterity: the relation of a parent to a child is the giving of a grace (life itself) that cannot be earned and, in the end, only related to by giving that unearnable grace to one’s own children

- the gospel: an attempt to work through the tangled complexities of the grace given to us by parents/Parents by taking up this grace as something that we ourselves give; sin is refusing or economizing this grace

- Terah tries to economize this grace by calling in Abraham’s debt when he tries to sacrifice him; Abraham marks no debts, pleads for his father’s life and wants to endlessly give this gift of life to his posterity?

- again, the ethical problem of Abraham’s being told to lie about Sarah

- could we use a typology to understand these ethical conundrums? a kind of typological re-ordering of the ethical?

- our expectations of a “flawlessly” ethical God simply don’t seem to fit the texts – is the problem with our expectations rather than with the text?

- is God engaged in a kind of ethical bricolage? making the best out of the way things are? because the world, always already given, never perfectly conforms to our ethical imperatives? thus we sometimes need to make the “least bad” choice and accept responsibility for its badness rather than imagine some other kind of world in which ethically perfect actions are possible? is the problem located in our desire to have an ethical system that only returns ethically pure results? is the problem epistemological (we just don’t know enough to see how ethical perfection is possible) or ontological (reality is such that ethical perfection is a mirage)?

Abraham 3

- God appears to be described as experiencing time; time of a different “order,” but time nonetheless

- is God’s “other” time a different way of “relating” to time?

- does vs. 14 indicate we should read the entire discussion of astronomy as really a discussion about children and posterity?

- vs. 16 provides a fascinating formulation of infinity (for any two orderable things, there will be a third higher thing . . .): does this found a Mormon ontology on multiplicity/infinity rather than on unity or duality? does this formulation say: everything is one or many but there is no such thing as a dualism because two implies infinity? does our Mormon materialism demand a choice in favor of infinity?

- though intelligences are hierarchically orderable, ALL are co-eternal

- “to be chosen before we were born”: the immemorial, the always already of things having started without us, preceding as a non-recoverable pre-history

- the immemorial dimension of our own histories: our co-eternality? our definitive lack of any identifiable or recoverable point of origin?

- our immemoriality: the problem of our relation to our parents/Parents (or lack thereof!)

- a non-libertarian reading of our co-eternality: our “having always already existed” does not mark the epicenter of our irreducible freedom and autonomy, rather it means that there is NO beginning to which we could appeal as the auto-foundation of our liberty

- it may be worth noting that the moment the story gets ethically complicated (Ab. 2) the story shifts scale from the personal to the cosmological

- stars are used metaphorically in Genesis, but metonymically in Ab. 3 (Kolob metonymically stands in for God as a scepter for a king)

Abraham 4

- it is important to Abraham’s account that creation is a corporate venture

- here the creation of the covenant community echoes (and is intertwined with) the creation of the world

- establishing the covenant community entails, each time, a creation of a “new” world?

- vs. 27, the empathic plurality of the gods gives greater weight to the introduction of sexual difference in that male/female are, together, in the image of the gods?

Abraham 5

- the emphasis on the Gods counseling

- vs. 3, the curious use of the word “decisions”; generally decisions are only required when a way forward is not obvious or when the material situation does immediately appear suitable – is this why it’s necessary to constantly counsel? to get everyone’s consent in the ongoing (and not predetermined?) process?

Individual Papers - Discussion Thread

2007-10-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

A thread on which one might bandy about ideas for the individual papers. (Thanks to Robert for the suggestion!)

Notes Toward a Report: Question 1

2007-10-22T13:38:00.002-07:00

If Abraham is the paradigm of fidelity to God, then what are the essential elements of this faithful relationship?

Notes Toward a Report: Question 2

2007-10-22T13:38:00.001-07:00

What can Abraham's relationship with God tell us about the nature and possibility of theology?

Notes Toward a Report: Question 3

2007-10-22T13:32:00.000-07:00

How do our family relationships shape our fidelity to God and, potentially, the kind of theology we pursue?

Notes Toward a Report: Question 4

2007-10-22T13:30:00.000-07:00

What is unique about a Mormon understanding of Abraham?

Gift of Death - Chapter 4

2007-07-12T11:09:00.001-07:00

It may not be a good sign to be swamped in the middle of the summer but that's the way things have been the past few weeks. I would like to post some final thoughts about the concluding chapter of the Gift of Death but likely won't get to it for a few more days. In the meantime, I thought it might be worth while to open up a thread for the chapter and see what comments and ideas develop.

"Whom To Give To"

2007-06-28T14:07:00.000-07:00

As an undergraduate, the first philosopher I read was Derrida and the first book I read was The Gift of Death. I picked it up because someone I admired and with whom I worked at the MTC (he was, in fact, a serious former student of Jim's) told me that one of the most significant and transformative spiritual experiences of his life occurred in connection with his reading The Gift of Death. I've tried to make it a rule to never turn down such book recommendations. I don't know for sure what passages he had especially in mind, but I have a hunch. And I'm pretty clear about which passages ended up producing a similar effect in me. In both cases, I think they are here in the third chapter.

A few comments and transcriptions.

1. "We tremble in that strange repetition that ties an irrefutable past (a shock has been felt, a traumatism has already affected us) to a future that cannot be anticipated; anticipated but unpredictable; apprehended, but, and this is why there is a future, apprehended precisely as unapproachable. Even if one thinks one knows what is going to happen, the new instant of that happening remains untouched, still inaccessible, in fact unlivable." (54)

The trembling produced by the mysterium tremendum is the living bridge between the trauma of the past (irrefutable, irreducible, and unmasterable) and the secret that is the future. The future, here, being constituted by the fact that it is necessarily a secret that cannot be told, a secret that is structurally rather than accidentally a secret or mystery. What gives the future a future (what makes it other than a modulation of the present) is its secret. We never know what's going to happen. The limit of the future, the limit that marks the future as absolute rather than relative mystery, is death. The gift of death is the secret that death holds and the future that death's secret both gives and forecloses (gives, Derrida would say, by foreclosing).

Within a Derridean framework we might say that typology is this living, trembling bridge between the unfathomable past and the secret of the future. Except, for Derrida, the quivering connection between type and antitype and is possible only if the antitype remains a secret (if it were not a secret the future would itself collapse) and thus the meaning of the type, though irrefutably given, remains a mystery. Or we might say: in a Derridean typology, we receive an endless series of powerfully transformative types but the antitype that would definitively reveal their meanings can never, by definition, be given.

2. "What is it that makes us tremble in the mysterium tremendum? It is the gift of infinite love, the dissymmetry that exists between the divine regard that sees me, and myself, who doesn't see what is looking at me." (56)

What does love have to do with death? Love is our trembling in the face of the secret/future that death gives. Love is a trembling in light of the dissymmetry between what I apprehend and the secret that the Other holds.

Love, Derrida would maintain, is only possible insofar as the antitype is never given and the meaning of the type is never definitively unveiled. Death makes love possible because death is what gives us an end, but it gives us end that we can only receive by no longer being around to receive it. It promises to tell us the secret by promising to keep the secret a secret. Love, founded on dissymmetry, is necessarily absurd: the books can never be balanced, the debits and credits can never be zeroed out, no universal equivalence can ever be accomplished. It is the dissymmetry of love that renders it immune to money (the universal equivalence machine) and, thus, unconditional.

3. "He [Abraham] says something that is not nothing and that is not false. He says something that is not a non-truth, something moreover that, although he doesn't know it yet, will turn out to be true." (59)

This is, I think, a tantalizing formula for doing theology (and typological theology). When we do theology properly we manage to say things that are not nothing and that are not false. When we do theology properly we manage to say things we do not know the meaning of but, nonetheless, will turn out to be true. We venture a wager in faith on the meaning of a type, but do so in the absence of its key, the antitype.

4. "If I obey in my duty towards God (which is my absolute duty) only in terms of duty, I am not fulfilling my relation to God. In order to fulfill my duty towards God, I must not act out of duty . . . . It is in this sense that absolute duty (towards God and in the singularity of faith) implies a sort of gift or sacrifice that functions beyond debt and duty, beyond duty as a form of debt. (63)

What does sacrifice have to do with the gift of death? What does sacrifice, as Abraham enacts it, have to do with the secret? Sacrifice is (as Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita) the only mode of action that escapes the bind of conditioned actions. It is the only mode of action capable of giving a gift. It is the only way to act that eludes the trap of debt. Sacrifice simultaneously preserves what it sacrifices and sacrifices for the sake of preserving what is sacrificed.

Say we sacrifice the antitype. Derrida's point is that we can only preserve the antitype as a messianic antitype by sacrificing the possibility of its arrival. Or: the only way to love my wife is by constantly sacrificing my desire for the affects that she produces in me (the affects that I love). If I love her for those affects, if I love her out of duty to the debt that I owe her because of what she gives me, then I will have failed to love her and loved, instead, only what she gave. So that it is impossible to perform my duty to her (to love her) out of duty. In order to perform my duty to love her, I have to sacrifice that duty as a duty and love her without regard to what I owe her or receive from her. I can only love her by sacrificing my love for what gifts come from her.

Sacrifice, then, is the kind of action capable of keeping a secret: it can perform a duty without duty knowing that it has been performed. It can keep duty a secret from itself.

5. "Kierkegaard rejects the common distinction between love and hate; he finds it egotistical and without interest. He reinterprets it as a paradox." (65)

The paradoxical sacrifice that love enacts has to reject the common distinction between love and hate because, commonly, both love and hate are modulations of self-interest. In order to love Isaac, Abraham must sacrifice him. Abraham must hate him, sever any connection he has to or interest in what Isaac gives to him. Only by hating him can Abraham become free in a way that will allow him to love Isaac without the intervention of debt and the interest of self-interest. Love is neither love nor hate but some impossible third things beside them both. Faith is neither faith nor doubt but some impossible third thing beside them both.

6. "I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others . . . . I betray my fidelity or my obligations to other citizens, to those who don't speak my language and to whom I neither speak nor respond, to each of those who listen or read, and to whom I neither respond nor address myself in the proper manner, that is, in a singular manner (this for the so-called public space to which I sacrifice my so-called private space), thus also to those I love in private, my own, my family, my sons, each of whom is the only son I sacrifice to the other, every one being sacrificed to every one else in this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of every day." (68, 69)

If this were the only passage worth reading in Derrida's corpus, it may still be worth the effort to read his work in its entirety.

In my estimation, life in the Spirit begins here: with the revelation of a responsibility that is not bound by any consideration of self-interested guilt and accountability at the judgment bar of God (or man). This is the revelation of a responsibility to others that exceeds anything that God (or man) would either reward or punish us for fulfilling or not fulfilling. The revelation of an absolute responsibility that can only be taken seriously by sacrificing both an attempt to be universally responsible (the tragic hero) and an attempt to limit our responsibility parochially (the aesthete). An absolute responsibility that we can only enact by sacrificing the other others to another other, both preserving and resigning what we sacrifice.

What is beautiful about this passage is it's non-intellectual, non-mystical, non-religious mundanity. This land of Moriah is our habitat every second of every day. This has do with the cat that I choose to feed and all the cats that I don't. It has to do with the time that I spent at work rather than with my family and the time that I spent with my son rather than with my other son. It has to do with the gift of time that death gives by assigning an end to time: there are only so many minutes in a day and I must do something with them but I cannot do everything. This is the Abrahamic bind and it is, according to Derrida, the bind that gives birth to an experience of faith, decision, mystery and the absolute. In other words, this is the bind that gives birth to religion. I have to decide what to do without knowing what to do because the very condition of possibility for a meaningful decision is not knowing which way to decide.

7. "Our faith is not assured, because faith can never be, it must never be a certainty. We share with Abraham what cannot be shared, a secret we know nothing about, neither him nor us. To share a secret is not to know or to reveal the secret, it is to share we know not what: nothing can be determined. What is a secret that is a secret about nothing and a sharing that doesn't share anything?" (80)

- Adam

Derrida's Gift of Death, chapter 2: "Beyond"

2007-06-18T08:52:00.000-07:00

I want to begin this week by focusing on Derrida’s focusing on Patocka’s focusing on Poe’s/Heidegger’s focusing on that which escapes focus: the purloined (Lacan, you’ll remember, transgressed Baudelaire’s volee by focusing on the etymology here, rendering “purloined” as “prolonged”) letter. In one of Derrida’s more brilliant linguistic plays: “Heidegger himself, and his work, come to resemble a purloined letter. He is not only an interpreter of the play of dissimulation who can be likened to one who exposes letters; he or it is also in the place of what is called here being or the letter [l’etre ou lettre].” Heidegger thus plays two roles: he is the philosopher who eulogized philosophy (giving it its very being, but thereby cutting short its time), and he is the philosopher (inevitably like all philosophers) who is never eulogized by anyone but suicides (that is, philosophers).

I was reminded again and again in the course of reading “The Secrets of European Responsibility” of a curious little paper by Francis Landy, titled “Tracing the Voice of the Other: Isaiah 28 and the Covenant with Death” (found in Exum and Clines, The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible, 140-62). Landy writes: “The primary symbol in the passage [verses 1-8 of Isaiah 28] is drunkenness. Drunkenness in Isaiah is a paradigmatically inane defence against death, as the carpe diem motif, ‘Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’ (Isa. 22.13), suggests. Drink fends off but also anticipates death, anaesthetizing fear and rendering the subject unconscious.” (p. 150) This fleshing out of drunkenness leans on her earlier articulation of poetry: “Poetry plays with alternative worlds, with the infinite combinations of sounds and images, with the transition between narcissistic omnipotence and the terror of finitude. It is a game with language and the world that constitutes preeminently a ‘transitional object,’ transitional between mother and child but also between union and separation. The spoken or unspoken other player in this game is death, not only in that poetry tries to make sense of the world despite death, nor in that it seeks immortality for our voices and our lived experience, but in that it passes between being and non-being, what can and cannot be said, the thought of being and the unthought.” (p. 142) At precisely that point, she adds in a footnote about Heidegger on poetry: “But if poetry marks a trace of the holy, it also sounds the knell of the philosophical subject.” (p. 142).

I think this nicely traces the contours of Derrida’s discussion of Patocka’s paper: in Plato, Europe makes a covenant with death, but in Christ, death makes a covenant with Europe. But let me take up Landy’s paper primarily as a kind of excuse for reading Derrida in an Isaianic idiom (without trying to get too involved with genealogies, it was in part my encounter with precisely the Isaiah passages I’ll take up below that gave birth to this curious Abraham seminar…). That is, following up on a comment I made perhaps a week ago, I’d like to think more carefully about the Isaian image of the seal.

Isaiah 8:16 nicely articulates Derrida’s/Patocka’s Heidegger in (I’ll leave this undecided) 1976/1967: “Bind up the testimony, seal the law among my disciples.” Gerhard von Rad takes this passage as the key to an important historical puzzle: when and why did the writing prophets begin writing? (His brilliant reading of this problematic is found in his section on First Isaiah in volume II of Old Testament Theology.) If von Rad does not thematize the act of sealing at any length, let me emphasize the importance of doing so in any serious attempt to grapple with the broader problem of Mormon theology (and I imagine we can all sense which of our four questions is at the center of my thinking this week).

David John Buerger opens his “history” of Mormon temple ordinances (The Mysteries of Godliness) with the claim that “Some time between June and November 1831, however, LDS salvation theology changed, tied to the 3 June 1831 conferral of High Priesthood on church elders.” (p. 2) He makes this change primarily a question of sealing: “This notion, when taken with key Book of Mormon passages, represented a departure from biblical precedent. In the New Testament, for example, the terms ‘to seal’ and ‘to place a seal on’ referred to the ancient practice of placing a wax or mud seal to close and protect a document from misappropriation.” (p. 3) He unfortunately then goes on to sum up the Book of Mormon references to sealing up a text as “obvious non-figural usages of the term.” (p. 4) But it seems pretty easy to sense in Buerger’s approach a (rather common) presupposition that does a great deal of violence to the meaning of the Book of Mormon in the Restoration: the Book of Mormon, as a sealed text, is precisely a question of sealing the fathers and the children (according to what is usually dubbed the “Nauvoo theology”). The title page itself makes this clear, since, in all rigor, there the Book of Mormon is first and foremost written “to show unto the remnant of the House of Israel what great things the Lord hath done for their fathers; and that they may know the covenants of the Lord, that they are not cast off forever,” only secondarily---“also” is the term the title page itself uses---“to the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that JESUS is the CHRIST.” Nor is one justified in reading some kind of distance in the “Nauvoo theology” from textuality, translation, or writing: “It may seem to some to be a very bold doctrine that we talk of---a power which records or binds on earth and binds in heaven. Nevertheless, in all ages of the world, whenever the Lord has given a dispensation of the priesthood to any man by actual revelation, or any set of men, this power has always been given. Hence, whatsoever those men did in authority, in the name of the Lord, and did it truly and faithfully, and kept a proper and faithful record of the same, it became a law on earth and in heaven, and could not be annulled, according to the decrees of the great Jehovah. This is a faithful saying. Who can hear it?” (D&C 128:9)

But polemics aside, what of sealing---of Heidegger as a “book that is sealed,” of the purloined letter as sealed despite its broken seal (or really, its two broken seals), of Isaiah and the Book of Mormon as sealed, of Abraham’s facsimiles and even text as sealed, of families and covenants as sealed, etc.? But collapsing the sharp (ultimately historical) distinction between sealing documents and sealing covenants/people, might we not pave the way to some real work on what constitutes a uniquely Mormon theology? At the very least, we would thereby be laying the foundation of a theology devoted primarily to the two extremes that temporally define the prophetic work of the prophet Joseph: on one extreme, an angel with a text; on the other extreme, the “family kingdom.”

…Even as I would appear, I think, to leave off much of Derrida’s discussion, let me argue that I am hardly doing so. The “thought-through” (that is, impossible) Christianity Patocka pines for is precisely, I would suggest (but would anyone else here?), what began in 1820 in the Sacred Grove (and I don’t, by that, mean the Church, but the Kingdom). And if we can agree with Derrida about much of what he has to say about the mysterium tremendum---and I do, for now---then we might suggest that death has indeed made a covenant with Europe (or with Ephraim). That is, the impossible gift is being given in every temple we’ve built (gift: endowment), and it is being given in much the manner Derrida is describing. And that gets me thinking about two comments from the recent PBS special on Mormonism, one from Terryl Givens about the temple as a kind of vehicle for total reconstitution, and one from Harold Bloom about Joseph Smith’s Mormonism being the only religion that really aims at fully conquering death as such. But this preface is already twice as long as my entire post should have been…

At least this can be said of the sealed as such: the sealed is the epistolary (and the secret, the tremendum, as Derrida will say at the beginning of chapter 3). The Book of Mormon is a prime example. Written to the Lamanites and sealed up. And, as we are all quite aware, it remains a sealed text: two-thirds, they say, of the text has never been cracked. But what of the part we have read? Are we not simply reading the address of an epistle? The Book of Mormon, as we read it today, is precisely the seal (that is, the signature) and the address on the outside of a letter to the Lamanites (given: the address and seal are quite lengthy!). What in the Book of Mormon is profoundly public---all that has been published---is given to the Gentiles as to a carrier: the Gentiles have the task of working out (and in some detail!) the address, of making sense of the seal and the address, and then of delivering the text up to those who will break the seal and read the contents (and whether or not the addressees desire to share those contents with the Gentiles will be entirely up to them). (And we do not even begin to address here the question of having to translate the address/seal, etc.) And what is clearest, perhaps, of all in that seal and that address is that this is a letter written by the fathers and for the children, written precisely to turn the hearts of the children to their fathers (written: an act that can only be described as the turning of the hearts of the fathers to the children; and an act that can only be brought to completion in the turning of the hearts of the children to the fathers).

Hence, the epistolary, the sealed letter: a binding or welding link between the fathers (according to the covenant) and the children (according to the covenant), delivered “by way of the Gentiles,” the Platonic. (Joseph Smith as hermeticist, as translator: a Westerner trying to make sense of the Eastern---trying to translate characters of ancient date---in an attempt to retreat from the Western, to retreat from the Platonic, in what has been called, by Marvin Hill, a Quest for Refuge….) The absurd, as a kind of call (Nephi tells us that the deaf will hear the word of the book, remember), passes through the public---that is, ethical (in Kierkegaard’s sense)---sphere as a trace, as an address and a seal, being carried from one to another precisely by the individual, the citizen, the Platonist, the European, the Gentile. The text, sealed up and sent, comes as a message, a messenger, true messengers, fathers or angels with/by a book (or a letter, taking especially into account the theme of “the end of the book and the beginning of writing” in all its ambiguities).

But too many themes are converging here. In a word: Mormon theology as an epistolary theology?

The Gift of Death, chapter 1

2007-06-14T12:30:00.000-07:00

In this first chapter, "Secrets of European Responsibility," Derrida, drawing on the work of Jan Patocka, sketches in a history of the modern self, which is to say, a history of responsibility, conscience, and consciousness. This genealogy takes three principal stages, with two transitions: primitive orgiastic religion is incorporated into Platonism, which is in turn repressed by the mysterium tremendum of Christianity.

Orgiastic religion is poorly defined in the chapter---perhaps Derrida is here relying heavily on Patocka, whom I have not read---and I've been unable to google up anything very useful. But to the extent that I understand the argument, the orgiastic rites from which Platonism emerge are enthusiastic---that is to say, initiates experience something like possession, an abandonment of self and volition to a communal experience of emotion and being. These orgiastic mysteries are then incorporated, but not subsumed or extinguished, by Platonism; Derrida draws on psychoanalytic meanings of "incorporation" that escape me, but, very broadly and in the signature deconstructive gesture, Platonism is shown to retain within itself secret traces of the orgiastic mystery it purports to surpass. Platonism introduces the responsible self at the threshold of the cave, that is to say, Platonic responsibility resides in one's vision of the Good. That gaze originates, crucially, from an internal and internalized seat of the self; it is a major objective of the chapter to show that this gathering in or "secreting" of the internal self and a kind of care or solicitude for death are mutually constitutive.

On to Christianity. Derrida argues that Christianity represses Platonism, again drawing on psychoanalytic meanings that I'm not equipped to evaluate, but again suggesting, very broadly, that Christianity retains secret traces---nay, broad swaths---of Platonism precisely as it denies those traces. The locus of Christian responsibility is the what Derrida calls the mysterium tremendum: the assymetrical relationship that opens the subject to the gaze of God but conceals God from the subject's own gaze. (It is this assymetrical nature of the gaze, I take it, that distinguishes Christianity from Platonism.)

Derrida goes on to make a further assertion about the modern---that is, Christian---self, namely, that the essential condition of Christian responsibility is heresy and dissent. The reasoning, if I've got it, goes as follows:
1. Responsibility can never know itself---that is, cannot acknowledge its historical origins, its historicity---but must claim for itself an autonomous, ahistorical transcendence
2. Because responsibility lacks self-knowledge, it can never act on the basis of comprehensive knowledge of the world
3. Thus responsibility must always be self-authorizing and self-authenticating and self-legitimizing, because it cannot legitimize its actions and choices on the basis of complete knowledge
4. That is to say, because it is self-authorizing rather than subject to a higher authority, responsibility is always already heretical.

I will leave it in the able hands of commenters to tease out the implications of this chapter for our project; I'm still in the digesting stage. Actually, still in the eating stage; by all means please correct my misapprehensions, of which I have no doubt there are many.

Problema III -- more

2007-06-07T13:50:00.000-07:00

Since Adam pre-empted my section (thank goodness!), let me respond to some of what he and others said, both with particular responses and with wandering musings, even ruminations.

Adam wonders whether Kierkegaard isn't "too neatly align[ing] the ethical with the universal." I think the answer is "yes," as Levinas argues. For Levinas, the ethical is first of all the relation to the other person, a singular relation. In the presence of the third person (which it turns out is there from the beginning) that relation to the individual becomes a relation to the universal.

We could distinguish these two by referring to the first relation as the ethical—our ethos—and the second as the moral—our rules of conduct. If we make that distinction, then God is certainly beyond morality ("beyond good and evil," to steal from Nietzsche), but I doubt that he is beyond ethics. But is there a gap between ethics and religion? That is more difficult. The gap between morality and religion is easy to see. We talk about it as the difference between the Spirit and the law, and every Primary child learns about it, though perhaps it is less and less a topic taught overtly. However, what about a gap between ethics and religion?

As I said, that is more difficult. I don't think that Levinas sees any such gap. For him, to be ethical is to be religious. (See Otherwise than Being 168, the last half of the third full paragraph). There is a sense in which I can agree, but I do not think his view takes account of covenant. Our covenant relation to God is the relation that establishes our relation to other persons. The saying that has never been present and which obliges me, my responsibility for the other, which I have never assumed, binds me to other persons (OTB 168), but it has its origin in an even more primordial relation, that to God, the covenant relation. SK's authors rarely if ever speak of covenant, so they rarely if ever speak of true biblical religion.

What about the "return" to immediacy? That return doesn't mean leaving universality behind to go back to the black cows in a black night. We can understand the "re-" in "return" not to mean "once again," so that "return" means to go back to where one came from, but to mean "to continue" as it does in "resound." To resound ("re-sound") is not to go back to some original sound, it is to prolong the sound. So I take the return to immediacy to be its continuation rather than its mere repetition. Continuation doesn't occur in opposition to memory (distinctions among cows, universality), though it may seem to. Immediacy could not continue without memory. Without memory, even immediacy would be forgotten—or not even forgotten because never remembered.

Thus, thinking of pure immediacy, I like Hegel's image, but also Nietzsche's in "The Use and Disadvantages of History for Life," part 1:

Observe the herd as it grazes past you: it cannot distinguish yesterday from today, leaps about, eats, sleeps, digests, leaps some more, and carries on like this from morning to night and from day to day, tethered by the short leash of its pleasures and displeasures to the stake of the moment, and thus it is neither melancholy nor bored. It is hard on the human being to observe this, because he boasts about the superiority of his humanity over animals and yet looks enviously upon their happiness—for the one and only thing that he desires it to live like an animal. The human being might ask the animal: "Why do you just look at me instead of telling me about your happiness?" The animal wanted to say, "Because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say"—but it had already forgotten this answer and hence said nothing, so that the human being was left to wonder.

But he also wondered about himself and how he was unable to learn to forget and always clung to what was past; no matter how far or how fast he runs, that chain runs with him. (Unfashionable Observations [frequently translated Untimely Observations], translated by Richard T. Gray, 87)

To live in pure immediacy would be to be unable to remember and, so, to be unable to speak or even to think. Yet that we cannot live in pure immediacy does not mean (as Hume may have thought it does) that we are, intellectually, completely cut off from immediacy. The trace, a term that Levinas gets from Plotinus and Derrida gets from Levinas, is the unspeakable but ever-present immediacy in universality. Skepticism's distrust of universality is appropriate, for universality denies the immediacy traced within it. But skepticism runs the risk also of claiming too much for immediacy and, therefore, of denying universality its due. For the skeptic, immediacy "is all we know," though we cannot know it in any meaningful sense without universality. Without universality, without memory, we are merely black cows in a black night or, perhaps, young calves gamboling mindlessly in Alpine fields on whom night is yet to descend, though it doesn't matter.

Does the return to immediacy require the absurd? If by "absurd" we mean "what philosophy cannot hear" (the original meaning of "absurd" is "what cannot be heard"), then I think the answer is "yes," which is why John of Silence is the author of our treatise: he says as much as the philosopher can about being a Christian, but he cannot hear what Abraham says, though presumably the Christian can. Perhaps the Christian can even hear through what John of Silence says to what a Christian can say. Perhaps the Christian can hear what John cannot say in what he can say.

So speaking of Christianity, of our relation to God, requires philosophical silence. But it does not require mere silence. The Christian can speak. He or she can preach the gospel. They can bear witness, but they cannot say something that philosophy can hear because philosophy is tone deaf—except Christians can speak to philosophers ironically, posing perhaps as someone who cannot speak, who is not yet Christian, who finds Abraham both admirable and absurd. Saying what philosophers cannot hear even though it is said.

De Silentio is criticizing family life when he says that it is the height of the ethical. It does not get beyond the universal. That proves that he is no Christian, for if he is right, then we cannot be the children of God and Jesus' sonship is religiously meaningless. Romans 8:14-16:

As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.

Religion is ultimately about family, so it cannot be that the family is merely ethical. Indeed, verse 17 makes that clear: "If children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together" (my italics).

We can only be sealed to the Father as a joint-heir with Christ if we suffer with Christ. But suffering is always individual, one real person at a real time. Suffering has no universal; it has no place in the Kierkegaardian ethical, though it is unavoidable in the Levinasian ethical.

It seems obvious to me that this business about suffering has something to do with our understanding of Abraham's sacrifice, but I don't know what it is. Any ideas?

Problema III

2007-05-30T14:53:00.000-07:00

Some comments on and questions about Problema III.

“The ethical as such is the universal; as the universal it is in turn the disclosed. The single individual, qualified as immediate, sensate, and psychical, is the hidden.” (82)

I wonder if K doesn’t too neatly align the ethical with the universal (perhaps Derrida is already on my mind). And I wonder, too, how aligning the ethical with the universal ends up inflecting many of the ethical concerns Jeff has so cogently raised about God’s own actions in the Genesis narratives.

Jeff, are you willing to go along with K’s strict identity of the ethical and the universal? It seems also that, for K, God would necessarily be beyond ethics (though obviously in a way that doubles the ethical movement, that holds it in place and transgresses it). Can we, as Mormons, admit any difference between the ethical (the universal) and the religious (the absolute)? Or, if we allow for a gap between them, would God cease to be God?

The flip side of the question has here to do with the individual as hidden. If the religious is an absolutely singular relation to the Absolute (God), then what of the possibility of theology?

“Philosophy teaches that the immediate should be annulled. This is true enough, but what is not true is that sin is directly the immediate, any more than faith is directly the immediate.”(99)

This passage brings me back to a consideration of some Ralph’s concerns a few weeks ago. Obviously, a return to the immediate (the state of “original unity,” the “dark of night in which every cow is black”) is not what we’re after in our relation to God. But if the immediate can only be fractured by a contradiction (by the introduction of the negativity of consciousness), then I’m not sure how we would think about a “post-immediacy philistinism” sans the absurd (because the absurd always takes the form of a contradiction).

I’m deeply sympathetic to demands for religion to be rationally intelligible, but I don’t see how we can avoid or soften the necessity of the absurd contradiction. Without it, aren’t we back in the field with the cows? Any suggestions, Ralph? Perhaps I’m misreading the nature of the problematic here (or, more especially, what you’re after). Do we require a Hegelian resolution of the contradiction? Or (I’m hoping) is there some third option?

“It is amusing to think about how odd it is that doubt about the immortality of the soul can be so prevalent in the very age when everyone can achieve the highest, for the person who has actually made just the movements of infinity scarcely doubts. The conclusions of passion are the only dependable ones—that is, the only convincing ones.” (100)

The knight of faith “scarcely doubts.” Partly because he already did the work of doubting? The reason K gives for this is that the conclusions of “passion” (passion = the proper response to a paradox) are dependable. He seems to indicate that they are dependable not because they are infallibly “correct” but because they are convincing and passionate. Is this to say that one does not overcome doubt by definitively defeating skepticism on its own terms but by passionately exceeding skepticism for the sake of something else? Is this why faith remains in relation to the absurd? The field of reason is perpetually the field of skepticism? The field of reason must be traversed, but it can't be entirely straightened out?

“For Abraham the ethical had no higher expression than family life.” (112)

Here, for K, the family is expressly not a part of the religious dimension – except insofar as the ethical must be simultaneously preserved and transgressed by the knight of faith. Can we, as Mormons, be satisfied with this account of how the family connects (only secondarily) with religion?

“His response to Isaac is in the form of irony, for it is always irony when I say something and still do not say anything.” (118)

Is the point here that theology, insomuch as it approaches faith, is necessarily an ironic discourse? Theology is possible, but only as irony? Irony is the only appropriate discourse for the paradox of the absurd?

Rosalynde, what do you make of our rhetorical options here? Is it necessary to speak in religion? Should we be silent about the absurd? Should we be ironic in bearing our testimonies? Is there some other rhetorical option?

Fear and Trembling: "Problema II"

2007-05-29T10:10:00.000-07:00

I'm still stuck thinking about the individual vs. the universal that Kierkegaard focuses on so much in this and the previous chapter. I think Adam's right in pointing to Badiou's notion of a "universal singularity" as a fruitful approach to thinking about this issue. I was hoping to gain a better understanding of what this means before posting, but I'm already very late in posting this so I'll have to made due.

In Hallward's appendix to his book on Badiou, he gives a brief history of the Axiom of Choice. I don't understand very well (yet!) how this plays out in Badiou's thought, but it's given me a lot to think about, esp. pertaining to this issue of the individual vs. the universal. First, what is interesting about this axiom is that it is an axiom which is independent from the other, less controversial axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel (ZF) set theory. This essentially means that we can assert the Axiom of Choice, or the negation of the Axiom of Choice, and the implications of either assertions will be consistent with the rest of the ZF axioms. This ties in with the idea in my previous post about the production of truth(s). And I think it explicitly ties in with D&C 93:30, "all truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself." Of course it may just be coincidence that "truth" and "independence" are the terms used here, but I think the possibilities suggested by reading this passage from an Axiom of Choice and Badiouian vantage point are intriguing. In particular, this suggests (to me at least) that the possibility of theology is importantly tied to the independence of truth. Or, to take K's words more directly, "the single individual is higher than the universal" seems to imply that if we are to talk about God, we must talk about his relationship to each of us individually(/independently). This touches importantly on some unique LDS ideas, such as the fact that we don't baptize infants because we believe they are not accountable--accountability itself thus seems to be a radically individual concept. (Note also the several unique LDS scriptural passages regarding sinning against greater light and an individualized rather than universal notion of accountability....)

But doesn't this radical individuality of truth, theology, accountability, etc. undermine the possibility of community and lead to extreme relativism and incoherence? This is where I think set theory makes for an interesting analogy: for an axiom (or any logical proposition) to be independent, it must not contradict other axioms (propositions). How might we appropriate this mathematical result for thinking about the possibility of community, or the structure of families? I think it points to a peculiar notion of peaceful coexistence, perhaps as described in D&C 121:34ff ("principles of righteousness" in v. 36?). If each of us are ourselves independent truths (in a particular sphere), then perhaps our eternal sphere of independence is contingent on provenness to cohere with others, according to these principles of righteousness. And inasmuch as we violate these principles of righteousness, we become captive to the devil--or, in set-theoretic language, we become subject to other axioms/truths (but then does this imply the devil is a truth himself, a "law unto himself" per D&C 88:35?).

Next, considering what the Axiom of Choice means, it essentially assumes the existence of (infinite) sets that cannot be constructed by any rule. I think this has interesting parallels to how we might think about agency and becoming gods in LDS theology (issues that Adam has at least hinted at before). If YHWH is the Unnameable One, and taking his name in vain is such an important prohibition, then perhaps it is related to His radical independence as a God--bound perhaps by principles of righteousness, but unbound in terms of possibility. And so when we are given new names which are not to be uttered in this temporal sphere where we have already been given temporal names, we are effectively being given the promise of eternal independence (as Abraham symbolically gives Isaac...). Only in an eternal setting where infinity is appropriately approached (i.e. sacredly), is the new name uttered. And in that sacred utterance, the name connotes infinite possibility and respect (i.e. it is not a confining, rule-based name like a temporal name...).

Also, part of what seems promising in thinking theologically about the Axiom of Choice is in terms of the relationship between what is sayable in a logically rigorous way and what cannot be said. Without the Axiom of Choice, set theory essentially becomes a constructivist enterprise. This, I think, has deep implications for how we think about faith and sign-seeking (esp. in Alma 32), and the extent to which philosophical discourse can talk about faith, transcendence, etc. Badiou makes an interesting distinction between truth/philosophy and knowledge. As Hallward puts it, "Every universal . . . is a consequence of a decision, . . . a matter of being-true rather than of knowing. Philosophy consists of the analysis and articulation of such universalities" (p. 251).

I am, however, still rather puzzled by this use of the term "universal." I wish I'd looked at this earlier--it's a rather interesting address by Badiou where he lays out 8 theses which give an overview of his philosophy. In particular, he lays out this tension between the singular (K's "individual", roughly) and the universal (K's "absolute," though also related to K's "universal," I think...) in a rather interesting way, but I'm still trying to make sense of this. Is Badiou's event more like the coming-into-being of an unpredictable, unnameable infinite set, or is an event more like the Axiom of Choice itself which declares the existence of such unnameable sets/processes and is independent of all other axioms? In what sense is an event/truth universal? Is this more than what I was describing in terms of independence above? Irrespective of Badiou, is there a meaningful way we can talk about K's absolute duty of the individual (to the absolute)? Although JdS in fact talks about this absolute, to what extent is it more than a poetic-pointing-to? If we accept this abolute individual relationship to God, what is an appropriate language to talk about this relationship? What are the implications for a scriptural hermeneutic--can we meaningfully take up scripture as a community, or is it ultimately an individual undertaking that "cannot be mediated"? K talks to us indirectly through JdS who has not experienced genuine faith--is this indirect and somewhat vague, deconstructive, pointing-to type of discourse the best we can hope for in terms of talking about theology, or can we read scripture in a more positive theological or philosophical sense? (I think Badiou's criticism of all those following Heidegger is that they're doing what essentially amounts to poetry....)

Typical, I guess: a very meager attempt to take a step forward which unleashes a whole host of issues causing me to take several steps back!

Fear and Trembling: "Problema I"

2007-05-24T09:03:00.000-07:00

[This post will briefly discuss some of my thoughts from reading "Problema I"; sometime this weekend I plan to write something on "Problema II" so that we can take up "Problema III" next week, as per the schedule.]

I think this issue of the individual vs. the universal is a very rich idea for Mormons to take up, because of our emphasis on individual exaltation (becoming as God is!?) as well as our emphasis on "personal revelation." Also, I think this is a good opportunity to try to take up again the discussion of One vs. infinity that Adam and Joe were discussing at length earlier. In particular, Adam said here,

"[T]ruths then must be produced rather than deduced because they are grounded in the procession of the infinite rather than in the givenness of the One."

This idea about "producing truths" rather than deducing them is endlessly fascinating to me, esp. in how it relates to the Mormon notion of eternal increase. I hope I am not alone in not quite understanding what Adam means by "the procession of the infinite." In fact, I think this might be an interesting way to approach Mormon theology, as an attempt to think about how this procession of the infinite takes place. Or, as JdS might put it, how does the individual become greater than the universal?

I think that what I will term hierarchy plays an important role in understanding this production of truths. In Abraham 3, we saw a very interesting hierarchical formulation of infinity (v. 16, "if two things exist, and there be one above another, there shall be greater things above them"). I wonder how this might relate to the modern LDS notion of priesthood jurisdiction (i.e. one can receive revelation for one's family, but not for one's ward, except for the bishop). I'm not claiming this is a true or even useful way to think about hierarchy (esp. as it relates to the procession of the infinite), but I think it's an interesting way to at least begin thinking about the issue. Another way to formulate this same question is in terms of the Third: if I am torn between two conflicting obligations, how can I decide between them? I'm suggesting that we consider an answer that takes some notion of hierarchy quite seriously.

When Abraham was caught between Sarah and Hagar, God, as a higher authority, mediated for Him (telling him to grant Sarah's request). Faith, then, might be taken as an affirmation of higher authority, an authority that worldly societies do not see or recognize (which leads JdS to the conclusion that faith is absurd). And so, although I think Ralph rightly points out that liberal democracy offers a promising way to construct worldly societies, I'm inclined to see liberal democracy as lacking an important kind of grounding that I think is more readily found in, say, hierarchical theocracy (however such might be structured...). The Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith both seem to say interesting things about democracy, but I'm not sure how this relates to the more hierarchical structure that seems so pervasive in Church examples (like obedience to God's authority).

But if the procession of the infinite takes place hierarchically, what is the nature and structure of this hierarchy? Here, I think D&C 121:34ff is justified in being as popular as it is because it seems to imply that every hierarchical relationship is conditionally established. If God's kingdom (a term with important hierarchical connotations, I think...) can be established "only upon the principles of righteousness" (121:36), then I think we should consider a hierarchical production of truth that does not reduce to authority which is merely given (I'm referring back to Adam's phrase "rather than the givenness of the One" which I quoted above). That is, no authority is absolutely given, but all authority is contingent on these "principles of righteousness" (though this suggests to me that these "principles" might be viewed as given...) which grant each intelligence, no matter how lowly, a voice. It is this check on absolute authority, this 'giving of a voice to all subjects of authority,' that I think opens the possibility for each subject to become himself/herself a truth that can eternally increase.

Well, this is but one strain of thought this reading elicited in me. If I have time perhaps I'll raise other thoughts below. I'd be very interested in hearing others' feedback and thoughts on my comments and/or the reading itself.

FEAR & TREMBLING: "Preliminary Expectoration"

2007-05-07T10:33:00.000-07:00

On re-reading this text after many years, I am struck by how much I have been marked by it, how much I have over the years been discovering my own question in the traces that this text had long ago left in my mind and spirit. I confess that it is not only an intriguing and deeply moving text to me, but I also that I am convinced it bears some extremely important truth about faith, and therefore, it seems to me, about hope and about the meaning of our humanity. At the same time, I wonder whether this truth is limited by the polemical, anti-Hegelian context of the argument – like so much European philosophy of the 20th century, I would be inclined to say. In mid-century France, at least, it seems that Hegel’s claim that reason itself was identical to his system – that Hegelian philosophy (or its Marxist development) was the unsurpassable culmination of Reason – was practically a given among those who favored it and, especially, among those who opposed it. (Thus Sartre: Marxism is incontournable.)

This is not at all to say that I would confine Kierkegaard to the limits of, say, Sartre. (And not to say, for that matter, that Sartre can teach us nothing.) For one thing, Kierkegaard’s insights into pre-modern philosophy (Socratic philosophy, broadly speaking) are often very profound. Still, my very tentative question, the main point I need to understand better in order to know what my faith has to do with what Kierkegaard is describing, or, rather, evoking, concerns the prominence of the category of “the absurd.” Is the moment of the absurd really a necessary moment in faith, or is this rhetoric a part of an anti-Hegelian polemic that is not necessarily central to the deepest question? This is what I would like to know. I suppose I am enough of a lingering Thomist, in a very general sense, that I resist this category of “the absurd.”

It occurred to me on this re-reading that this “Preliminary Expectoration” can be read as Kierkegaard’s dialogue with “philistinism.” K. is one moved by greatness, by the extraordinary. “I am not unfamiliar with what the world has admired as great and magnanimous.” (33c) But beyond all worldly admiration is faith; one might say it is truly “beyond praise;” it is beyond the categories human are competent to praise; it is incommensurable with worldly greatness. And yet it must be praised.

I’ve been saying, “Kierkegaard,” but of course I should say, “Johannes de Silentio.” I am at a loss as to the meaning of this distancing from Kierkegaard’s ownmost voice. When JdS says that he cannot understand faith, or make the movements of faith, does this leave open the possibility that K does understand and make them? Is this an “aesthetic” presentation of a trans-ethical truth; somehow an impersonal presentation of what is most personal, “subjective,” existential? (I read what the editors say about this in the Historical Introduction, but I’m not sure that I follow it.) So, with this caveat, I continue to refer to the author as “K.”

Kierkegaard seeks to praise what is beyond praise: faith. Faith is more heroic than heroism and more transcendent than the object of pure philosophic contemplation. K. does not understand it and cannot account for it … and yet he is sure of its greatness. So great a marvel is the knight of faith that “I have not found a single authentic instance…I have not found anyone like that…” (38c,e) But on second thought “every second person may be such an instance.” (38c) Can it be that the “all bourgeois philistinism I see in life” is in fact the “marvel” of faith (51c), that what is most extraordinary is altogether at home in the utterly ordinary? This is the possibility that one might say haunts this whole essay – the possibility that the meanings of the ordinary and of the extraordinary are somehow completely scrambled, at least insofar as the appear before the contemplation of a writer with a taste for the extraordinary, a writer keen to praise himself in his affinity with the extraordinary. (Ah, now maybe this is why K needs JdS: the ordinariness, the philistinism of faith cannot speak for itself; and so it needs an extraordinary, literary spokesman … but then this spokesman must miss something essential in his taste for extraordinary, the heroic, the splendid – “But I do not have faith; this courage I lack… my joy is not he joy of faith.” (34b-c) And so perhaps the polemic of the “absurd” could be ascribed to a necessity of this literary-philosophical standpoint, concerned as it is with “greatness.”)

……………..

The opening paradox is acute: faith as a “work.” “Only one who works gets bread.” But this “work” is precisely that of “anxiety” and faith: the work of abandoning the logic of works.

(35f. :)Philosophy is finally the sacrifice of the finite for the eternal: it is resignation. This is profoundly true, I think, of the fundamental spirit of philosophy, only masked somewhat by the transformative, humanistic project of the moderns. (Hegel is here, as always, a synthesizer: humanistic transformation … but finally as an object of … contemplation!) The genius of faith appears in the contrast with this spirit of resignation. In sacrificing Isaac, Abraham does not resign himself to his loss, as is shown by his immediate joy in receiving him: Abraham doesn’t miss a beat: he performs what appears to be the most extraordinary sacrifice, but then lands on his feat, as prosaically as can be, loving his son as fathers love sons – not otherwise, one might say, but more: “he received Isaac more joyfully than the first time.”

This seems to me perhaps K’s central, his finest insight – or let’s just say my favorite. The one who is willing to sacrifice everything is the same one who receives it perfectly “in stride.” The philosopher, the “knight of infinite resignation,” knows how to let go of the finite; he loses the princess “because in the eternal sense he recollects her… he has grasped the deep secret that even in loving another person one ought to be sufficient to oneself.”(44c-d). “The act of resignation does nto require faith, for what I gain in resignation is my eternal consciousness.” (48b) But the knight of faith sacrifices everything and yet somehow renounces nothing. “Temporality, finitude – that is what it is all about.” (49c)

To the bafflement of the poet-philosopher, the man who praises himself by praising what is great, it turns out that the category of greatness collapses: the “contrast to existence [transcendence, otherness, the extraordinary] expresses itself as the most beautiful and secure harmony with it [immanence, the ordinary.]” (50b) Meaning does not show up in the world hierarchically; the truly other is somehow ordinary because it is incommensurable.

For this reason K’s richest example may not be the most dramatic (the princess) but the most apparently prosaic: all praise to the [apparent] philistine who fully expects his wife to have a roast lamb’s head with vegetables waiting for him. But she doesn’t, and “curiously enough, he is just the same.” (40b) This is the man JdS envies – whom he understands to achieve everything “by virtue of the absurd. (40d-e) Elsewhere “the absurd” is presented as faith in something impossible, but here, in this perhaps subtler analysis, the essence of faith seems to be the ability to except the finite as a gift of the infinite - beings as a gift of Being, I’m tempted to say – but, unlike Heidegger, really to accept the gift, with “delight in it as if finitude were the surest thing of all.” Everything common or ordinary: a roast, the sight of a rat scurrying or children playing, even an interesting little capitalist calculation -- all this presents itself “as a new creation by virtue of the absurd.”

What is “absurd” to the “self-possessed” philosophical mind, the mind that has learned to resign the miracle of beings in order to secure its own self-possession, is not so much any particular impossibility or contradiction as the miracle of gratitude for the particular – that God, the Eternal Being, could bless this particular father with this particular son, that this bond could somehow be grounded in Eternity.

For a soul formed in the admiration of “the great and magnanimous” to conceive that “temporality, finitude – that is what it is all about” (49c) – this is indeed “amazing,” if not, perhaps, precisely “absurd.”

…………………………
Separate thought-strand:

Compare Kierkegaard’s radical severing of reason and revelation with Pascal’s – Protestant and Catholic versions, respectively, of extreme, trans-rational transcendence. Somehow Pascal’s radical transcendence remains colored by the contemplative philosopher as the ultimate figure of greatness, whereas Kierkegaard’s results in the possibility of an infinitely deep “philistinism.” Compare the latter with the inner-worldy asceticism of the Calvinists, according to Max Weber.

Abe 5

2007-05-03T12:02:00.000-07:00

I'll do my best briefly to summarize the ongoing discussion of Abraham 5 (forgive me for failing to grasp all the nuances of the various readings, my own included).

1. Creation is emphatically a plural effort in Abraham 5, implicating this account in our ongoing discussions of community.

2. Reckoning shows up as an important word in Abraham's personal interjection into the creation account in verse 13.

a. "Reckoning" also appears in Romans 4, with reference to Abraham in Genesis 15, and thus the word is implicated in questions of grace and works

b. The word "reckoning" appears in Abraham 5 without any explicit reference to grace; however, the idea of the Lord's "appointing" Adam's "reckoning" may introduce divine grace

c. "Reckoning" is used prominently in Abraham 3 with reference to time and the measuring of time; this raises the question of when reckoning occurs, and whether sin and grace are temporal conditions (this also hearkens back to some of our discussions of typology, and the temporal aspects thereof)

d. Authority/obedience are cognate to grace given/grace received, because both interactions disrupt human moral autonomy

e. And yet... and yet... This reading may not yet tidily contain Abraham 5 into a grace paradigm.

Fear and Trembling, Part 1

2007-05-02T06:29:00.000-07:00

How ridiculous that I naturally feel to approach this with more fear and trembling than the texts we have spent the past few months on! Be that, however, as it may…

Johannes de Silentio: Obviously, this name is of the utmost significance. Since I’d like to dwell particularly on the prelude in my post, it is absolutely vital: how is this name connected up with the “Silent Confidant” of Repetition (which was published the same day as Fear and Trembling)? Whatever broad answers we might provide to this question, I’d like to take this question as a key to the prelude (note: not as a key to sorting out the prelude, but as a key to asking questions about the prelude).

Hence, a few words on the prelude, first in a rather broad register. What Kierkegaard puts together here is, quite simply put, astounding. There is a wealth of thought in these, what?, five pages. (If only Kierkegaard had given us a full book of this!) The prelude obviously lends itself to our first key question: Abraham as the model of fidelity. But if I can, I’d like to take up the prelude (again, in the name of Johannes de Silentio) in terms of our second question: Abraham’s fidelity as a model for the possibility of theology. And I’d like to approach this question with a series of questions that could probably be broken up into two categories: first, questions about the role of silence/speech in Abraham’s doing theology; second, questions about the role of speech/silence in Kierkegaard’s doing theology.

I will take up each… stanza? section?... separately, but first, a word or two about the prelude as a whole. Kierkegaard presents the whole of the prelude (Stemning, proem) as a series of enactments coupled with metaphors. (Jim, to what extent is Kierkegaard doing here what you’ve been talking about at feastupontheword?) This raises a number of questions. Why would de Silentio be singing (in a “still small voice”?)? To what extent are these enactments voiced? What is the significance of the song (proem, remember) being written down, but never sung to us? And what is at play, Rosalynde, in the pairing of a kind of enactment with a metaphor? That is, how does language interrupt the actuality of the enactments? Or are the metaphorical asides also enactments in a sense, though not enactments of the Genesis text? How do two enactments (that are, in the end, not enactments because they are written… though they remain, for all that, songs) play against each other in metaphor? Which is not, Adam, even to mention to what degree we ought to be dropping the name of Lacan here: the enactment of Genesis draws on the father and the son, but the metaphorical asides draw on the mother and the son. And if the father is, for Lacan, precisely language…? And one must ask whether the metaphorical asides are de Silentio’s interjections or simply his reports of the thoughts of the “man” he is talking about, “once upon a time,” etc. To what extent are these enactments theology? And to what extent are the metaphorical asides theology? Is either of these approaches to theology promising? Might either of them be like a uniquely LDS theology in any particular way? How are they different? Jim, how would the philosopher of food read the nursing theme that runs through the metaphorical asides?

I: Language plays a fascinating part in this first enactment, which is almost too horrible to read. Note the silence on the journey, but then the abundant speech, all aimed at deception. How does language, in its excessive abundance, function as a call here? And to what degree, Jeff, does Abraham in this enactment dislocate the ethical dilemma from the murder to his own voiced duplicity? That is, to what degree does Abraham’s deceptive language turn this experience into the experience on the way into Egypt? Why does Abraham speak to himself with a voice, rather than simply thinking? And what is the significance of Isaac’s shouted prayer? To what extent is it a response? To what extent is Abraham’s false front a call? Might this be connected up with Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie in a Non-Moral Sense”? (Might the whole prelude be connected up with the same piece?)

II: Now comes an enactment of the same scene but in perfect silence. Does the silence issue the same call to Isaac that the comforting pleas and deafening threats of Abraham did in part I? But then, to what extent and why does the silence destroy Abraham? That Abraham becomes old is interesting: does he begin to live-towards-his-death? That is, does his silence function as the silent call thematized in Being and Time? Or is the lack of speaking on Abraham’s part a kind of repression? How might this be taken in terms of Genesis 18, where Abraham is willing to give voice to his complaints? If both parts I and II result in Isaac’s thriving, might Genesis 18 be a kind of way between them?

III: This description is almost antiseptic except for the mention of Hagar and Ishmael. Why them in this retelling? And why is Ishmael nameless here (I suppose I’m thinking of the nameless Silent Confidant of Repetition)? Could “Often he rode his lonely way, but he found no rest” have reference to Hebrews 11, and the city to which Abraham always looked? Does this imply faith, then? It is certainly significant that Abraham voices himself in prayer, but it sounds as if he does so only alone and on mountains, without but looking for a city. Has the experience, then, Ralph, deprived him of the political? Why is he, that is, always on the mountain (Moriah—the site of Jerusalem, traditionally, of all places) thinking about Isaac, and not with Isaac in the polis? Why is this the only enactment in which we hear nothing about how Isaac does after the event, or even during the event?

IV: This last enactment perhaps startles me the most of all, because here is the only account in which Isaac’s faith fails. It forces me to wonder whether Kierkegaard was thinking about Isaac’s relatively small part in Genesis subsequent to the Moriah event (why does the proliferation of Abraham’s seed wait until Jacob?). And language again plays a fascinating role. Why does Kierkegaard differentiate between the reasons each has for not speaking of what Isaac saw? What does this say about their relative uses of language? And the interplay between sight and sound is interesting. Does Isaac lose his faith, Robert, precisely because he sees a sign, but never hears (nor speaks) a word? And then what is at work in the play between servant and son here? Eleazar is called precisely the “faithful servant,” while Isaac becomes the faithless son.”

“Every time he returned home after wandering to Mount Moriah, he sank down with weariness, he folded his hands and said, ‘No one is so great as Abraham! Who is capable of understanding him?’”

Why does Kierkegaard picture this man, in the end, speaking?

Abraham 5

2007-04-25T10:22:00.000-07:00

Rosalynde is out of town this week and asked if I’d fill in for her with a couple of comments of my own about Abraham 5. I’ll see what I can do and hopefully you’ll be able to help pick-up the rest.

vs. 2-3, “And the Gods said among themselves: On the seventh time we will end our work, which we have counseled . . . which we have counseled . . . which they (the Gods) counseled among themselves . . . at the time that they counseled among themselves.

Verses 2-3 bear the mark of some heavily repetitive language, but the repetition seems centered on the verses’ preoccupation with “counseling.” Anyone whose attended any kind of Mormon “counseling” meeting in the past week (and, really, who hasn’t?) won’t be surprised by this, but it’s probably important to have some feel for the novelty of its introduction in this context (and in the context of traditional Christian understandings of creation, God, etc.). Emphatically, these verses remind us that creation is a joint-venture, undertaken with one another for the sake of one another, with all of the necessary consent.

vs. 3, “. . . on the seventh time they would rest from all their works which they (the Gods) counseled among themselves to form; and sanctified it.”

I’m interested here in the connection between “rest” and “sanctification.” First, is there a connection? If so, what is the nature of the connection? In what way might “resting from work” potentially “sanctify” the work already accomplished? Would “endless” or “restless” or “uninterrupted” work be necessarily profane?

vs. 3, “And thus were their decisions at the time . . .”

I find it striking that “decisions” were involved in the creation process. Generally, decisions are only required when a way forward is not immediately obvious. Only a plurality of possibilities (viable or unviable) necessitate a decision. As Derrida likes to put it, only the undecidable requires a decision.

Is this the sense in which the work of creation is genuinely “creative”: it requires some not immediately justifiable decision in light of the constraints of the given, (and not optimal?) material situation? Is the contingency of such a decision what makes it necessary to so emphatically repeat that everyone had been consulted, all the Gods had counseled, and each had come to an agreement?

vs. 6, “But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.”

Note that Abraham here affirms (at least tacitly) a seamless stitching of the two versions of the creation story given in Genesis into one account. The “second” creation is not treated as “second” or as an “alternate” version of the story. I know we have theories about “spiritual” accounts and “physical” accounts, but I’m not sure how they fit in here. Also, the movement from the first Genesis account to the second perhaps punctures the Gods’ claim to have rested. Or, perhaps, it at least contextualizes it as a “break” in the creative process rather than as a kind of “retirement.”

vs. 7, “And the Gods formed man from the dust of the ground . . .”

vs. 16, “And of the rib which the God’s had taken from man, formed they a woman.”

Both man and woman are, here, made only out of pre-existing stuff. Can we make any hay out of these verses about “sexual difference” that would not simply repeat a classically patriarchal understanding of woman as being derivatively created from man? Such a possibility seems essential to our questions about the relation of theology to the family.

vs. 13, “Now I, Abraham, saw that it was after the Lord’s time, which was after the time of Kolob; for as yet the Gods had not appointed unto Adam his reckoning.”

Abraham bursts back into the narrative in this verse with a comment about time and Kolob. Curious that this is one of the few things about which he explicitly editorializes. Why? I’m tempted (though, perhaps, groundlessly) to connect Adam’s lack of specifically human temporality to his lack of both mortality and self-consciousness (he is not yet capable of “shame” in vs. 19 and has not yet gained “knowledge” from the tree). In order to be ashamed do we need to have a time that “is our own time”?

Comments?

Abraham 3 - Summary

2007-04-24T14:21:00.001-07:00

1. God appears to exist in time.

1.1. God’s time, however, is described is magnitudes greater (1000 times greater) than our time.

1.2. Does this difference in magnitude indicate a different relation to time? A kind of meta-time? Does it indicate a dimension of immemoriality?

2. There appears to be a kind of (typological?) equivalence between the stars, Abraham’s posterity, and the eternally existing spirits/intelligences that allows each to be read in terms of the others.

3. If two things exist, and if they can be ordered hierarchically, then there will also be a third greater than both of them.

3.1. This appears to supply an effective formula for generating an infinite number of “things.”

3.2. It may also bear on the question of what a Mormon ontology would take as fundamental: the One or the Infinite?

4. Despite the possibility of hierarchical ordering, all spirits are co-eternal, without beginning or end.

4.1. Rather than grounding a kind of libertarian notion of self-founded “freedom,” the co-eternality of every spirit may instead indicate that no spirit has access to its own ground or foundation: every spirit finds themselves always already thrown into the world.

4.2. This co-eternal “throwness” may have a particular ethical implication: the universe may simply be such that we must (God included) engage in a kind of ethical bricolage - rather than being able to precede on the basis of a set of absolute ethical principles.

4.2.1. Our co-eternal “throwness” re-opens the topic of grace: we find ourselves always already given both ourselves and the world. We can’t have earned or deserved this gift because it necessarily precedes us.

4.2.1.1. The cosmic conjunction of grace and “throwness” is micro-mirrored in our own relationships with our parents.

4.2.2. How we relate to the grace of this “throwness” (either cosmically or familially) may be salvifically crucial: do we (a la Jesus) honor the gift such as it is, or do we (a la Satan) refuse the gift such as it is?

Abraham 4

2007-04-19T21:18:00.000-07:00

I'm late, of course. And I'm not quite sure how to deal with Abraham 4 because it is so much like Genesis 1. What follows are more or less random thoughts.

In verse 1, "the Lord" speaks to those Gods who are with him and they go down together to organize the world. If "the Lord" refers to Jahweh rather than Elohim here, then who are "the Gods"?

Whoever they are, it is important to the Abraham account that Creation is a corporate venture. As opposed to Genesis and the Joseph Smith version of Genesis ("JST Genesis," which, interestingly, differs from Genesis in that God speaks in the first person: "And I, God, said"), it is the Gods rather than God who speaks each of the creative commands (e.g., "Let there be light"). Abraham's account is very much in line with Abraham's experience: an individual, he has been promised community in covenant; he has been promised that he will not continue to be merely an individual, but part of something greater. The creation of the covenant community echoes the creation of the world.

I'm not sure what to make of it, but I find it interesting that in Abraham 4, the Gods say (e.g., verse 6), order (e.g., verse 7), pronounce (e.g., verse 10), and they organize (e.g., verse 12), whereas in both Genesis and JST Genesis God either says or calls.

Also, in the Genesis and JST Genesis accounts, God saw that his creations are good, while in the Abraham account the Gods see that they have been obeyed. The last verse of the chapter especially emphasizes this: "Behold, they shall be very obedient." Is this change of focus from goodness to obedience also a reflection of the Abrahamic covenant?

So part of the creation of community by covenant is an account of the Creation. Is this, perhaps, to show us that the covenant renews the world, that it makes a new world for those who enter it? If so, then Abraham not only enters into the Promised Land, he enters into a New World.

The book of Abraham puts this knowledge of Creation prior to the Akedah. In fact, it puts it prior to the full establishment of the covenant as well as before his arrival in Canaan. Read this way, the revelation of the Creation is a revelation of the covenant that is to come, a revelation that the covenant introduces a new world rather than merely a reconfiguration of the old one. (My hobby horse again!)

By the way, I've created a PDF file with Genesis 1, Abraham 4, and JST Genesis 1 in parallel columns. I'm happy to share it with anyone who'd like a copy or, if someone knows how, to make it available as a link.

Abraham 3

2007-04-10T14:21:00.000-07:00

As I worked through the third chapter of Abraham the past few days I began to wonder what knuckle-head put together our reading schedule and put me in charge of talking about Kolob. And then I realized that I put myself in charge of talking about Kolob. And then my wife laughed at me :)

Nonetheless, this is, I think, an extremely interesting, singular, and complex passage of Mormon scripture (+ a facsimile!). I’ll do my best to toss out some observations and questions and see what kind of thoughts and responses you might have.

vs. 1, “And I, Abraham, had the Urim and Thummim . . .”

Could we read the Urim and Thummim as a kind a typological de-coder/re-coder that runs the mundane situation through an algorithm of immemoriality in order to reveal the world’s alternate meanings? Here, taking the stars as a “type” for intelligences and reading out of them truths about the nature of our relation to God, the gods, space, and time? That may be a little bit of a stretch – or not.

vs. 2, “And I saw the stars . . .”

An initial problem we face in reading the chapter (especially if we don’t read the discussion of the heavens as exclusively typological) is deciding what kind of cosmological context we ought to use as a background frame. Should we assume a pre-Copernican cosmology as a backdrop? A Joseph Smith era cosmology? A contemporary, “accurate” cosmology? I really don’t have the faintest. Any suggestions?

vs. 4, “And the Lord said unto me, by the Urim and Thummim, that Kolob was after the manner of the Lord, according to its times and seasons in revolutions thereof; that one revolution was a day unto the Lord, after his manner of reckoning, it being one thousand years according to the time appointed unto that whereon thou standest.”

Does the difference in the length of days apply experientially or just planetarily? That is, does the Lord experience a day on Kolob (1,000 years) in the same way we experience 24 hours here (so that he experiences a day for us as just 1.4 minutes)? Or does he experience time at the same speed as us but just on a much longer scale? (Of course, if you know the answer to this question, I have a couple of other things I’d like to speak to you about by private email.)

Either way, what strikes me as particularly interesting is the way that God experiences time – period. That God is, according to this account, is in time. I’ve always been much more amenable to this view than the classical position that locates God extra-temporally. If an eternal life is not in some sense temporal, then, whatever it is, it won’t allow for anything even remotely like the lives, relationships, loves, etc. that we experience here. Time is, for us, the very stuff of life and the very meaning of a relationship.

What seems to be at stake, then, is question of one’s relationship to time, the way in which time is taken up in one’s passing through it and extension in it. This notion connects nicely with all our previous discussions of the immemorial as being a certain kind of relation to time rather than something non-temporal. It also intersects with our discussion of types as “folding” time or reconstructing and re-orienting time.

We could describe sin, I think, in purely temporal terms as a mis-relation to time (e.g., my present is held captive both to the weight of my past and my fears for the future) and the atonement as a re-opening of the gift of time (i.e., life) when time seems to have come to a stop (I’m “stuck” in sin!) or we appear to have run out of time (I’m dead!).

This not exactly how things play out in these verses but, minimally, we should come away with the notion that our (sinful? profane?) conception of time is not the only possible conception of or relation to time. Another order of time, magnitudes more powerful, is possible and this “other” time is what God is offering Abraham (and us) access to.

vs. 6, “And the Lord said unto me: Now, Abraham, these two facts exist, behold thine eyes see it: it is given unto thee to know the times of reckoning, and the set time . . .”

I’m interested here in the language of “facts” and they way that the chapter keeps circling back to this locution (“there are two facts,” “these two facts exist,” etc.). What do you make of this? Is the “fact” in question the “reckoning of times” or is the “reckoning of times” something that Abraham is given privileged access to here in addition to the bare facts about greater and lesser lights? Is time a “fact” or some “fact +1”?

vs. 14, “And it was in the night time when the Lord spake these words unto me: I will multiply thee, and thy seed after thee, like unto these; and if thou canst count the number of sands, so shall be the number of they seeds.”

The cosmological narrative breaks in verse 14, interrupted by the repetition of God’s promises to Abraham about his numberless posterity. Should we retroactively read all of the preceding discussion of the heavens, etc. as really a discussion of children and posterity? The stars being a type for Abraham’s seed? Not Abraham’s children being like the stars (though this is the phrasing used), but the stars being like Abraham’s children? This may find support in the way that the reiterated promise explicitly incorporates a reference to “sand” as countless rather than limiting itself to the obvious stellar parallel – as if to say that the stars, like the sand, are a just a metaphor for something else.

vs. 16, “If two things exist, and there be one above the other, there shall be greater things above them . . .”

This is a fascinating formulation of infinity. For any two terms placed in relation, there will be a third. And a third for this third. And so on. Here, it is the ordering of magnitudes (“if one is greater than another, then there will be a third”) that allows for the infinity of relations and differences to unfurl.

vs. 18, “. . . as, also, if there be two spirits, and one shall be more intelligent than the other, yet these two spirits, notwithstanding one is more intelligent than the other, have no beginning; they existed before, they shall have no end, they shall exist after, for they are gnolaum, or eternal.”

The pay-off comes explicitly in vs. 18 with the transition from the discussion of cosmology to a discussion of spirits or intelligences. The relationship between the two discussions is explicitly described as analogical: “as, also, . . .”

What interests me about this verse is the way that it backs off of or punctures the hierarchical ordering: “notwithstanding” the differences in intelligences, all the spirits are co-eternal. None is absolutely reducible to its hierarchical position. There is a kind of primeval and anarchic atomism that asserts the shared, generic eternality of each spirit, a co-eternality that no ordering can overcome or erase.

I’m also struck by the way that there is no “softening” of the blunt differences in intelligence, no attempt to apologize for the political incorrectness of such an assertion. It is simply a “fact”: some spirits are more intelligent than others. It’s just the brute facticity of the way things are. Nobody made these things, nobody asked for them to be this way. We can organize and order them in different, loving ways, but, in the end, we just have to work, each of us, with what we’ve got. And if you think you’re so great, be careful - there is always a third greater than you.

It’s as if salvation and creation are a kind of unavoidable bricolage, a process of working things through from the material necessity of where we are and doing what may be done with what there is, giving what gifts can be given and receiving what gifts may have been sent our way. Whether you’ve got one talent or fifty, that’s just the way things are. The issue is what you do with it.

Is there a touch of Stoic fatalism (not necessarily in a negative sense, but possibly in a very positive sense) in the way that the “facts” of the cosmological order are laid out here?

vs. 23, “He stood among these spirits, and he saw that they were good; and he said unto me: Abraham, thou art one of them; thou wast chosen before thou wast born.”

This is a nice description of the way that our lives are structured in advance of us, given to us even before we are there to receive them.

(The possibility of being given something before we exist to receive it is, I think, the primary sense of the “immemorial” as Jim introduced it: that which precedes time itself making time possible, a non-recoverable pre-history).

Though, here, the picture is nicely complicated by the way that we “have always already been.” I’m tempted to say, however, that this does not refute the point that we were given something before we existed but that it confirms it. It confirms it with an argument that we have “always already been thrown” into ourselves, that we never were not always already given in advance of ourselves.

Everything depends, then, on how we choose to relate to this always already given gift or grace. Everything depends on how we relate to this immemorial dimension of our own histories that is the gift of life given in advance of itself, unearned and unmerited (who could “merit” the grace of a life always already given?). Do we resent not being self-created, master of our own destinies, as intelligent as we’d prefer, or do we accept the grace by extending grace to others with what grace we have?

The drama of our familial relationships then plays out this same drama again on an earthly scale: I’m born to parents who have named and called me in advance of my having even existed in the world and everything will depend on the way that I (and they) relate to this immemorial dimension that defines what a family is.

vs. 25, “And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them.”

This verse is an interesting extension and generalization of the “testing/proving” that originally anchors the climax of Abraham’s story in Genesis 22.1. It is also an interesting way of talking about how the gods are involved in the process of creating and extending truths: the anarchic/generic co-eternality of the spirits must be tested and ordered and structured for a genuine infinity to unfurl. The unending must be qualitatively transformed into the “eternal,” profane temporality into faithful temporality. An infinite chaos is not sufficient. Orders of infinity must be constructed and elaborated, one above another.

vs. 28, “And the second was angry, and kept not his first estate; and at that day, many followed after him.”

The primal drama of choosing a Savior almost too neatly fits my above description of what is at stake: one’s relation to one’s always already given estate. Will the gift/estate be accepted or will it be rejected out of anger and shame at not having been autonomous, “perfect” and self-created? Satan can’t bear the shame of his life having started without him, without asking him for permission, without his consent and control. Can I? How deep does my shame burn at my inadequacy? How thoroughly does it prompt me to deliberately hide myself (like Adam and Eve) from those intelligences greater than I (God above all)?

My general discussion question, then, for this week is the following (take it up as you prefer or prefer not to – I’m game for whatever you’ve got):

Q. What can we learn from Abraham 3 about the ways in which cosmology/the stars, endless posterity/the family, and immemorially co-eternal spirits are all theologically knotted together for Mormonism?

Abraham 2

2007-04-06T10:27:00.000-07:00

Sorry to be so late posting this. I've really struggled in deciding what to focus on. (Also, make sure you notice the last few comments on the previous post by Rosalynde and Joe.)

The hermeneutical challenges in knowing how to even approach the Book of Abraham are practically overwhelming for me to consider. There's a certain sense in which writing about this chapter is very much an unreasonable act of faith for me--how am I to read, write and interpret without having a good sense of how any of these tasks should be done? It is tempting to just focus just on these hermeneutical challenges and how they mirror the challenges of faith that Abraham himself faces.

It is also tempting to focus on Abraham's prayer for his father in verse 17. I think this is a very rich verse that makes me feel Abraham's (and so, symbolically, the Father's) deep pain regarding his father's unfaithfulness--a pain that is posited against the need to make a sharp break from Bablyon in order to start something new. I think this image of Abraham pleading to God to have mercy on his father--when God has just barely explained that he will destroy those who have been unfaithful to him--is ripe (or is it rife?) with possibilities.

But, in the end, I've chosen to focus primarily on the episode where God tells Abraham to tell Sarah to say in Egypt that she is Abraham's sister (vv. 22-24).

It seems the Lord advocates this lie for the purpose of preserving Sarah's life and therefore Abraham's family. There are several ways we might think about the "cost" of this lie, but it seems we must think about this cost as being inflicted more on the Egyptians than on Abraham or Sarah. It is the unyielding importance of preserving Abraham and Sarah (and their posterity) that seems to justify the lie. Although a little lie offered in order to preserve the lives of Abraham and Sarah might pale in comparison to the horror we feel at the thought of Abraham sacrificing his son, it nevertheless seems that at root we see the same kind of suspension of the ethical in both of these episodes. Furthermore, an important difference is that--if we join the Genesis account to this one--the unethical act in this case is carried out whereas the sacrifice of Isaac is not. So, although we might think about "God's nature" in such a way that it would never have allowed Abraham to slay his own son, the text here forces us to open ourselves to a God who is not bound by any narrow views of ethics. For anyone who has read about Nephi's slaying of Laban, this is not a new kind of irruption, since we see essentially the same thing occurring there. But in all this, I think I am just restating Kierkegaard. Is there anything new we can say about this?

Looking more carefully, we might notice that in both of these ethics-suspending accounts, we see an important role being played by family, records and priesthood. Nephi is told that God "slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than that a whole nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief" (1 Ne 4:13). This seems familiar from our reading in Abraham 1:17 where God tells Abraham that he will destroy those that raise an arm against him "because they have turned their hearts away from me." And then in the next verse (Abr 1:18) God continues, "I will take thee, to put upon thee my name, even the Priesthood of thy father." Again, it seems the Lord has little concern for those who are not interested in becoming part of the Priesthood community he is establishing. In describing an event, as it might be conceived ontologically, Adam said in his "Earthen Vessels" article (Element v. 1.2), "The world's horizons are forced to bend and twist in ways that reconfigure the rules according to which things get counted." Applying this thought to the Book of Abraham, it seems that only those that are willing to turn their hearts toward God will be counted--and we see that those that are not counted can in fact be destroyed and lied to....

More on Priesthood: In the previous chapter, we saw Priesthood discussed primarily in relation to the fathers. In this chapter, we see Priesthood discussed in terms of it becoming a blessing to all nations (v. 9 esp., but also key terms "ministry" and "Gospel" occur in vv. 6, 10, 11). This description of how the Priesthood will come to make other nations count seems quite interesting and important. We see Abraham, it seems, fleeing from land to land, wandering (as the children of Israel will later), encountering Babylon over and over again, praying--perhaps vainly--for those in Babylon, not only for his father with whom he must be close, but for the relative strangers in Sodom and Gomorrah.

Going back and rereading the events related in Genesis, events which occur after this chapter leaves off, I'm more inclined to look carefully for how this policy of lying to those outside the newly-forming community plays out. It seems there is no honest or peaceful coexistence possible with Pharoah, or Sodom and Gomorrah, or even with Hagar and Ishmael. Only with Abimelech do we see the beginnings of a possibly peaceful and honest coexistence, though this seems to have come about contingently, as a result of Abimelech's fear of God. In Genesis 23 I think we finally see the beginnings of a peaceful and honest (relatively speaking, since much of the dickering we read about may just be for show...) coexistence that is not contingent on others having a fear of God. It is here, it seems, that we finally see the need to lie to others cease. It is here, that I think we see the seeds being planted for the fulfillment of the promise about the ministry of the Gospel going to all nations.

Of course there is much more of interest in this chapter that we could consider, and I'd encourage any discussion of these other passages, but I esp. want to encourage discussion of this tension between the trans-ethical commitment that God seems to have for Abraham and Sarah, even if it means sacrificing those that do not show any faithfulness toward God. How do you think this issue in this chapter might help us answer the 4-key seminar questions?

Abraham 1

2007-04-01T18:31:00.000-07:00

I know that Jeff is preparing some questions and comments about Abraham 1 but I thought that I might, in the meantime, offer a few comments of my own as a kind of place-holder. (I’m also looking forward to Robert’s first opportunity to lead a discussion for us this week on Abraham 2.)

With the short amount of time I’ve got tonight, I’d like to simply comment on two verses from chapter 1.

vs. 1, “In the land of the Chaldeans, at the residence of my father, I, Abraham, saw that it was needful for me to obtain another place of residence.”

The first verse of chapter one immediately introduces what is, for me, the most striking (and, perhaps, important) difference between Genesis and the book of Abraham: the shift from an impersonal third-person narrative to an extremely careful and self-conscious first-person narrative ("I, Abraham").

Where the rhetorical style of Genesis is, as Erich Auerbach famously described it, elliptical, opaque, mysterious, and “fraught with background” in need of careful interpretation, the book of Abraham is intensely personal, detailed, and causally coherent.

This first verse is a good example. Where Genesis 12.1 starts off with a command from nowhere for Abraham to depart his homeland, Abraham 1.1 starts with Abraham explaining that he needs to find “another place of residence." The rest of the chapter then supplies a detailed narrative of both the internal interests/desires and the external causes/forces at work in moving him to this decision. In terms of conveyed content, Genesis 12.1 and Abraham 1.1 are very similar (“leave home!”), but in terms of rhetorical elaboration they couldn’t be more different.

Where Genesis has a very archaic, well-worn, almost “oral-tradition” feel to its prose, the book of Abraham’s prose has a very modern, introspective ring. Where in Genesis our knowledge of Abraham’s thoughts, feelings and personal motivations are consistently (and almost entirely) compacted into singularly telling and remarkably small external gestures (e.g., “he rose early in the morning” in Genesis 22), in the book of Abraham we get a veritable window into Abraham’s soul. It’s like we reading his own private diary – before practically anyone kept anything like a personal diary!

This difference in rhetorical posture does, I think, make an immediate theological difference. Because the book of Abraham consistently gives us so much more explanation (because it is interested in giving us reasons and explaining the causes at work in desires and decisions), it has a much more “Mormon” feel to it. What I mean to say is: a Mormon take on Christianity generally emphasizes the necessity of personal works and obedience and de-emphasizes the mysterious and unaccountable intervention of grace. By offering such detailed explanations for that which Genesis leaves unexplained, God’s relationship with Abraham is much less shadowy and much more predictable. There are reasons to like this, but there are also reasons, I think, to be cautious about it.

Also, I’m reminded of something we read in one of my philosophy classes this past week from Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals where Kant says (roughly) that something is only free if you can supply no external cause for it. If you can give a reason for it, then its dimension of “freedom” (or, for us, “grace”) has been more or less expunged.

Do we really risk so much simply in terms of a shift in narrative perspective? I may be exaggerating the differences, but I wonder by how much.

vs. 3, “It [the priesthood] was conferred upon me from the fathers; it came down from the fathers, from the beginning of time, yea, even from the beginning, or before the foundation of the earth, down to the present time.”

Note again the strong emphasis on continuity. As in the opening of Genesis 12, the “immemorial” is also invoked in this verse, but it is invoked not as the source of a temporal interruption but as the source of the stability and continuity which Abraham wishes to participate in and maintain. Here, it is a question of being a “rightful heir” and of “holding the right belonging to the fathers” (1.2). Is it possible to even imagine the language of “rights” as a part of the Genesis narrative? Nonetheless, it is absolutely central to this description of Abraham’s relationship with God and his reception of the promises and the priesthood. The use of the language of "rights" seems to indicate the same general theological shift referred to above: a shift of emphasis from unaccountable "gift/grace" to meritable "right."

I’m out of time, but I’m interested to see what you make of the differences between Genesis and the book of Abraham and how these differences play out rhetorically, spiritually, and theologically.

What other distinctive features strike you as pertinent?

Discussion summary: Reading Gen 22 through Gen 23

2007-03-20T12:55:00.000-07:00

We have almost unapologetically left the text behind this week, because the discussion has primarily focused on the rather broad and complex problem of typology, something suggested by Jacob's typological reading of Genesis 22 and several (round-about) confirmations of this in Genesis 23. The following paragraphs attempt only to establish the problems we have uncovered.

Thinking typology, it would seem, must begin with the question of "identity," that is, with the question of "typological structure." Two (broad, perhaps even unhelpful) typological structures have been (this week) proposed: type-antitype and type-archetype. Unfortunately, however, the relation/difference between these two proposed structures has not yet been made clear. What is ultimately at issue (and, for now, undecided) is what it is that the type ties typologically to.

Another difficulty in thinking typological structure: the question has been raised whether a typological structure is something "in itself" or something "for us," whether the structure is something inherent in what is tied together typological or whether the structure is something given to us (in either case, typology appears not to be something we impose).

In the course of discussion, it has been suggested that the structure of the sign and/or the play of differences might provide a starting point--or at least serve as a foil--for thinking about typological structure. This suggestion has underscored the importance of the question of temporality (roughly--perhaps sloppily--equated here with causality) in thinking typological structure. At the very least, it is clear that typology in some sense opposes temporality/causality (though even this might be too strong). The most progress has perhaps been made here, though the discussion is, for now, rather embryonic.

Finally, the question of how family is to fit into all of this has been raised, and, for the most part, left unanswered.

I would like to see discussion continue on this subject, perhaps best under this summary (if it genuinely recasts the important issues here).

Reading Genesis 22 in light of Genesis 23

2007-03-12T12:06:00.000-07:00

22:20 leaves the climax of the Abraham story behind, but it does so by returning to the words of 22:1, the beginning of the climax: "And it came to pass after these things" (there is the slightest difference between the two phrases in the Hebrew, but I'm not convinced it's significant). Two points might be made about the Hebrew terms here. First, the word translated "things" should not be read as reducing the content of chapter 22 in any way: the word (dbrym) has reference to the richness of encounter, usually denotes language (in the full sense of sprachen rather than the limited sense of sagen, if we can follow Heidegger here), and might even have etymological ties to the Holy of Holies (dbr). Second, the word translated "after" is worth mentioning. The Hebrew here (`hr) certainly can mean after or behind, but it also comes out in Hebrew in words like "foreigner," "stranger," and even "excommunication." I only bring this up to highlight something in Hebrew thinking: an event is, in the OT, never fixed, but always being surprised by the Other, the event that is still to come.

In short, if Genesis 22 overwhelms us (as 22:1 suggests we should be), the events that follow the Akedah are--we are being warned--just as overwhelmingly other. What I'd like to do this week, then, is think Genesis 22 through the implied categories of Genesis 23: if Genesis 23 somehow suggests that the Akedah is not climactic, is not a fixed event, how does it recast the Akedah and especially, then, all of our thinking about these four guiding questions?

Initial thoughts, then...

Obviously, the focus of chapter 23 is the death of Sarah and Abraham's purchase of the cave of Machpelah. This is, of course, introduced with an announcement of several births (and, with one's anticipation of chapter 24, the possibility of further births through Isaac). And it is no surprise, I suppose, to find birth and death at the heart of the story that follows the Akedah.

Interestingly, this story of death is characterized, as Isaac's is--at least in Jim's reading--by a separation: Abraham is in Beer-sheba when Sarah dies in Hebron (just as Abraham and Isaac are only a collective in Gen 22). Moreover, it is Sarah's death that finally leads to Abraham's first acquisition of land and, hence, the first fulfillment of the promise of that land (a point highlighted by Abraham's mention of his nomadic lifestyle to the sons of Heth). And again, at the very heart of the story in chapter 23, the theme of substitutability or exchangeability is introduced: the ram for Isaac, money for land.

In fact, we cannot overlook the role the economic plays in this chapter. Is Abraham appropriating Sarah's death somehow? He pays for specifically with silver, with the treasures of the earth: land for land. How should this be read? Is there a moment of totality/totalization here? Or is it better to read here a moment of excess? In fact, one must ultimately admit that there is a rather difficult intertwining of the excessive and the economic at play in this transaction (one to be mirrored later with the threshingfloor of Araunah the Jebusite... the site of the temple): there is a gift to be given, but Abraham refuses to allow it to be given, cancels the gift, but only in that he desires also to give a gift, which, because it precisely counters a gift, is no gift whatsoever. And several witnesses confirm all of this. What is at play here?

If one reads into all of this the cancellation of the excessive in the name of economics, can it be read also as the economizing (the totalizing) of the gift of the land, and even of the gift of (Sarah's) death? And yet Abraham mourns....

Not so initial thoughts...

So, Robert says, "Jim's paper takes place-holding as anti-community, but I don't think he means to rule out typological meaning, and I think typological father-son meanings are particularly prevalent and somewhat distinctive in Mormon scripture." I'd like here to take up this question of typology and place-holding, but I'm not finding that I can yet articulate my thoughts very well. Let me do this instead:

Gen 22 gives us the typological (perhaps 23 as well), and Gen 23 gives us the economic/place-holding (perhaps 22 as well). How do these articulate all four questions? It seems to me that even to ask whether Abraham is a model of fidelity is to ask a question about typology. And it seems to me that even to ask what Abraham's story can tell us about theology is already to assume the possibility of a "typological theology." And it is certainly clear that there is a kind of typological structure at work in the family, which is confirmed profoundly by the intersection between Gen 22 and Jacob's typological reading. And the Mormon scriptures have more to contribute about typological thinking than perhaps anything else, or so I am increasingly convinced.

Hence, how are we to think about typology here? How are we to think typology in terms of Gen 22? How are we to recognize the space between place-holding and typology? In short, here is the discussion question:

What is typology, and what is its significance for an LDS reading of Abraham as the faithful theologian and father?

Thoughts?

Genesis 22

2007-03-08T08:35:00.000-08:00

Well, I feel wholly inadequate to gloss or even frame this chapter in any satisfactory way (particularly since I've been out of play for the last few weeks, for which I apologize). This is, after all, the very threshhold of abattoir.

But a very few thoughts, merely by way of originating the thread, after which I invite your own observations, related or un-. So I was struck from the very beginning by the phrase with which the Lord and his messengers refer to Isaac: "your son, your only one." Robert Alter reproduces in the notes the Midrashic expansion of the phrase, in which Abraham objects that he has two sons, both of whom he loves, and the Lord, clause by clause, tightens the vice on Isaac. It occurs to me, then, that the chapter narrates a double slaughter, in which the Lord requires Abraham to relinquish both of his sons. Even at the moment of reprieve, in the words of grace, "Do not reach out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him, for now I know that you fear God and you have not held back your son, your only one, from Me"----even at this moment of supreme joy, Ishmael's absence (from the covenant) is underscored.

To broach a Mormon reading for a moment, in which Abraham's sacrifice of his "only son" is a type of God's sacrifice of his "only begotten son," the atonement itself, with its triumphant ending ascension of the Son, contains within it the exclusion of some other of God's sons. Mormon doctrines of moral agency and in particular our myth of the council and war in heaven emphasize the loss and risk an grief inherent in the plan centered on a sacrifice of the One for the many.

Sight and hearing are thematized (what an awful word) throughout the chapter, as well, in ways that recall the story of Ishmael in Genesis 16. I invite your thoughts on this recurring synesthetic theme: are seeing and hearing used to represent two different kinds of relationships to God?

Finally, although this does not speak directly to our philosophical purposes in this seminar, a few phrases of poetry in an otherwise starkly economical narrative (with credit to Alter, whose rendering I used): "he split wood for the offering" (v 3); "Abraham raised his eyes and saw the place from afar" (v 4); "And the two of them went together" (v 9); "And Abraham raised his eyes and saw and, look, a ram was caught in the thicket by its horns" (v 13).

Summary: Genesis 20-21

2007-03-06T20:42:00.000-08:00

We are reading a story of creation, but the story of creation is also a story of separation / cutting: Adam and Eve from God, Abraham from his family, Abraham and Ishmael, Abraham and Isaac.

The "good" separations involve covenant; the others do not.

The creation of the world will result in life between separated beings; it will result in covenant because covenant brings separated beings together without annihilating one of its parties.

Covenant is a response in which one gives voice to the person with whom one is covenanting.
Covenant is a response to pre-existing graciousness.
Covenant is an affirmation of the concerns of the other.

Genesis 20-21

2007-03-02T21:27:00.000-08:00

20

I find chapter 20 not only troubling, but mysterious; I'm not sure what to make of it. So let me deal with it by pointing to things in it that interested me and by raising questions.

Verse 1 of the chapter tells us that Abraham "journeyed from thence," but there is no referent for "thence" (shm): we don't know where Abraham is journeying from, but the text assumes that we do. Of course this is evidence of the redaction process, but if we take it as part of the text, as part of a whole, we can ask what it means in that text. What are we to make of the fact that we do not know where Abraham has come from when this story begins? Or does it begin from a situation, Abraham's situation in comparison to Lot's rather than from a place?

If we think broadly about the two stories and see the way in which each shows us a different kind of hospitable life, perhaps we can read this as saying that we see Abraham, who knows how to be hospitable, moving into potentially hostile company. He is entering a home where he cannot be assured of hospitality. That suggests that this chapter is about God's protection of Abraham when hospitality fails.

It is impossible to overlook the parallel between the story of this chapter and the story in Genesis 12:9-20. Verse 1 immediately makes the connection to the story in chapter 12 by using "journeyed" and "dwelled," translations of the same Hebrew verbs used at the beginning of the earlier story. The redactor wants us to know that he sees these stories as parallel; he is conscious of the existence of two stories and includes them both.

What might we get from comparing and contrasting the two stories?

There, Abraham went all the way into Egypt. Here, he goes to the border of Canaan, but not into Egypt.
There Sarai becomes became part of the royal harem. Here she doesn't get that far.
There Abram explains the political reason for referring to Sarai as his sister. Here he explains why calling Sarah his sister wasn't a lie.
In chapter 12, we don't know how the Pharaoh came to know that Sarai was Abram's wife. In this chapter, the Lord appears to Abimelech in a dream to tell him.
The Pharaoh puts all of the blame on Abram. Abimelech accepts some of the blame.
The Pharaoh immediately expelled Abram from Egypt. Abimelech allows him to choose the land he wishes.
The Pharaoh is concerned with what has happened to him (12:18). Abimelech is concerned with what Abraham may have done to his nation.
The earlier story is a foreshadowing of Israel's entrance, sojourn, and exodus from Egypt. Is this one also?

Abimelech's plea in verse 4, "Wilt thou slay also a righteous nation?" is very much like Abraham's plea for Sodom in Genesis 18:30-32.

Verse 7 is the only occurrence in Genesis of the word nabi, "prophet": God identifies Abraham as a prophet. (The word is used very sparingly in the Pentateuch, 12 times, with 8 of those times in Deuteronomy.) It strikes me as odd that it is important to this strange story that Abraham is a prophet.

An overall oddity is that in this chapter we see Abraham, who has already been shown to be a mighty warrior who can defeat multiple kings (chapter 14), afraid of one king, Abimelech—a king whom, as Word Biblical Commentary points out, Abraham has misjudged (2:72). Compare what God says about Abimelech in verse 6 with what Abraham thought about the country in verse 11.

And why does Abraham lie in verse 13 about using this ruse with Sarah "at every place where we shall come"? He's only done it once before.

In summary, Word Biblical Commentary is helpful once again: "This incident makes us realize that Abraham is not such a saint as we might have concluded from chap. 18, nor were all the inhabitants of Canaan so depraved as those who lived in Sodom" (2:75).

21

With chapter 21, we enter into more familiar territory, though that isn't to say that there are no difficulties.

The first story in the chapter is that of Isaac's birth and Ishmael's expulsion, and I think we have to read those two stories together: the birth of the covenant child means the expulsion of the child of the handmaiden. Can we think past twentieth-century sensibilities to see what the point is, and then, having done so, can we bring that point back in a way acceptable to our sensibilities?

Without trying to justify Sarah's anger or Abraham's complicity (nor deciding ahead of time that I understand that anger and complicity well enough to know what it means), one thing I see here is that covenant and promise are not the same. Verses 17-18 tell us that God will make a great nation of Ishmael, repeating the promise of Genesis 17:20: "I will make him a great nation." However, Genesis 17:21 adds: "But my covenant will I establish with Isaac." Though the promise of the covenant is that Abraham will be a great nation, that promise is not the same as the covenant. For Ishmael and Isaac each receives that same promise, but only Isaac receives the covenant.

So what is the covenant of Abraham? Is it "I will bless thee"? That seems to be the promise. Is it "Thou shalt be a blessing"? Isn't God saying that to be covenanted is to be blessed to be a blessing? Merely being blessed (Ishmael) is not enough and must be sent away. Being blessed to be a blessing remains.

The chapter ends with the covenant between Abimelech and Abraham. Is that to set up a contrast with the covenant that is to come in the next chapter, not only in the two covenants themselves, but the way in which they are established: Abraham offers sheep and oxen to Abimelech; he offers his son to God.

Summary: Genesis 19

2007-02-27T14:14:00.000-08:00

A brief (and rough) summary of some key elements of last week’s (ongoing) discussion:

1. Abrahams’ exemplary hospitality is an essential element of his fidelity to God.

2. It is crucial to distinguish Abraham’s “true” hospitality from Lot’s “false” hospitality.

2.1. Genesis 18-19 exhibits three types of hospitality figured in the Sodomites, Lot, and Abraham.

2.1.1. The Sodomites’ actions manifest a lack of hospitality.

2.1.2. Lot’s actions manifest a misguided sense of hospitality.

2.1.3. Abraham’s actions manifest a perfect hospitality.

2.1.2.1. Lot’s hospitality is misguided in that it remains mired in an excessive economy of demand, satisfaction, and retribution.

2.1.3.1. Abraham’s hospitality is perfect in that it exceeds and breaks with the economic bind of demand and satisfaction for the sake of an unconditional fidelity. (We will see Abraham sacrifice to God the very satisfaction God promised Abraham: a son.)

3. That Lot’s daughters violate the incest ban can be read as a culmination of the social dissolution manifest in the utter destruction of “urban” society.

3.1. The chapter appears to offer a thorough-going critique of urban existence per se. What are the implications for politics? Must we be, in some sense, nomads like Abraham? But what, then, of the promised city of Zion?

4. What should be made of the significant JST changes to the chapter?

Genesis 19

2007-02-20T14:12:00.000-08:00

I. Discussion Question

If Abraham’s unconditional hospitality is the very mark of his fidelity to God (to the point that he is willing to personally sacrifice [murder?] his own son when called upon), then what would allow us to distinguish Lot’s own excessive hospitality in Genesis 19 (manifest especially in his willingness to sacrifice the virtue of his own daughters for the sake of the two strangers) from Abraham’s? Or should they not be distinguished?

Are their actions similarly or dissimilarly beyond “ethics”?

II. Some General Notes & Comments

vs. 1-2 “And the two messengers came into Sodom at evening, when Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. And Lot saw, and he rose to greet them and bowed, with his face to the ground. And he said, “O please, my lords, turn aside to your servant’s house to spend the night . . .”

The structural parallels between 19.1-3 Abraham’s hospitality in 18.1-8 are potentially important. Alter points out that “the whole episode is framed in an elegant series of parallels and antitheses to Abraham’s hospitality scene.” Like Abraham, Lot is waiting outside and meets the visitors at an entrance – though here it is an entrance to a city rather than an entrance to a tent. Is this difference important? The shift from the nomadic to the urban does seems to contribute to a significant inflection in the narrative’s “feel.” For instance, the whole of the chapter manifests an antipathy to the urban: the cities are the site of wickedness/destruction and the angels will try desperately to convince Lot to leave the urban area altogether – though Lot will refuse to do so (see 19.17-22).

Does this antipathy to the urban tell us anything important about the kind of ethics or politics that the text would, perhaps in contrast, be willing to affirm? Is the connection between the urban and injustice essential or accidental? Must real politics be, in some sense, nomadic?

That Lot is sitting at the gate of the city may uncharitably be read as a result of his being at the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s evening and the public square associated with the city’s gate is not a place a respectable person would want to be found after dark. Though, on the other hand, we could read it more charitably as an indication of Lot’s participation in the public life of the city. Certainly, the fact that he is also so quick to offer hospitality to strangers suggests a more positive motive.

vs. 2-3 “And they said, ‘No. We will spend the night in the square.’ And he pressed them hard, and they turned aside to him and came into his house, and he prepared them a feast and baked flat bread.”

That Lot also insists on the extended hospitality even after its initial refusal, that he leads them back to his home (rather than having them show up on his own doorstep as Abraham did), and that he likewise prepares a feast, all indicate ways in which Lot’s hospitality appears to exceed Abraham’s own. However, where Abraham promises only “a little water and a little bread” and instead prepares a feast, Lot promises “a feast” and instead appears to prepare for his guests only the most common possible meal (baked flat bread). There is certainly a kind of irony at work here in this last juxtaposition. But is the irony sufficient to cancel out the “excess” of Lot’s hospitality over Abraham’s?

vs. 7-8 “Please, my brothers, do no harm. Look, I have two daughters who have known no man. Let me bring them out to you and do to them whatever you want. Only to these men do nothing, for have they not come under the shadow of my roof-beam?”

In one respect, at least, Lot’s hospitality to the strangers clearly exceeds anything Abraham is called upon to give: when the gathered crowd demands to have their way with Lot’s guests, Lot offers his own daughters in their place. The difficulties involved in this gesture may trump any of the ethical difficulties we examined in Genesis 18.

In one sense, the only proper reaction is to be utterly horrified at Lot’s willingness to deliver over his own daughters in place of the strangers. (And, in the end, it may be appropriately impossible to move beyond this horror). Nonetheless, Lot’s willingness to sacrifice the virtue of his own daughters for the sake of the other is also the mark of an extremely excessive hospitality. What could be more excessive? Perhaps only a willingness to allow his daughters to be murdered . . . or a willingness to murder them himself.

Lot’s excessive hospitality plays, I think, as a kind of foil for Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice (murder?) his own son. Both incidents raise very uncomfortable questions. What are the limits of hospitality? At what point must the line be drawn? What would allow us to distinguish between Abraham’s future action as justified and Lot’s action as not justified? How could one tell the difference, in medias re? Should Lot have thrown the two strangers out and protected his own family instead? Is there a correct action in the face of such a situation?

Most simply: is Lot’s hospitality a counterfeit hospitality to be contrasted with Abraham’s unconditional commitment to the Lord (Other)? Or do their actions belong to the same category? Either way, how would we tell?

I’d like to bring my initial comments to a premature conclusion here and reserve some additional comments about the rest of the chapter for later in the week. For now, I wonder if we couldn’t focus our attention simply on this initial difficulty. I’d be grateful for any suggestions, readings, and/or counter-readings. The greater the diversity of opinion and perspective, the better the results are likely to be.

Genesis 18

2007-02-13T09:33:00.000-08:00

Reading the Old Testament has a way of making my modern ears (eyes?) burn a little. In Chapter 18, I was struck again and again by the ethical ambiguity with which the Lord is portrayed, at least the ambiguity filtered through as the story passes through the lens of contemporary culture.

For instance, why does the Lord make particular mention of Sarah’s laughing when just a chapter earlier Abraham received no direct rebuke for his identical laughing? Relatedly, why is it that Sarah is not sitting with Abraham and the Lord rather than hiding behind the tent door, presumably preparing the meals that Abraham has commanded her to prepare? The Lord even refuses to speak directly with her at first, talking instead with Abraham and later only speaking with her through the tent door.

More vividly questioning the moral status of the Lord is his impending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. He apparently feels some type of shame in regard to the act, wondering whether He should tell Abraham about the plan (I admit that it is unclear, at least in the King James Version, exactly why it is that the Lord does not want to speak with Abraham about His destructive activities.)

More importantly, the fact that Abraham negotiates with the Lord seems to suggest both that the Lord was previously going to destroy the town regardless of at least some of the righteous persons within it and that the Abraham, not the Lord, is the chief agent responsible for the mercy shown in this situation. Why would the Lord destroy any innocent persons, presuming that He has the power to destroy the wicked without simultaneously destroying the innocent? Even granted the legitimacy of capital punishment (a grant many would be unwilling to make), the Lord’s apparent lack of concern for those not worthy of death seems morally inexcusable. Why must Abraham persuade the Lord to save their lives? That the Lord is willing to renege on His intended destruction of the righteous after Abraham’s pleading, often cited as an example of His mercy, seems to my lights less like mercy than the concessions of a sovereign somewhat, but not altogether, persuaded of the ethical problems posed by his actions.

And we have not even considered that the traditional “reason” given for God’s decision to destroy—at least the traditional reason accepted by the LDS edition of the scriptures (see Gen. 18:20 fn. b)—is something that, while we may even agree is morally offensive, we surely do not see as meriting the death penalty. It looks, then, like we have a misogynistic God preparing to kill at least some righteous individuals in order to punish their neighbors for deviant but in all probability non-lethal sexual practices.

All of the above I consider the reductio ad absurdum of this way of reading scripture. But I find myself at a loss as to how to read this chapter otherwise. (Here I call upon your help.) And because of this loss, I am unclear as to how the four questions suggested in our methodology can be answered through this chapter.

We do learn something about the nature of faith from Abraham’s example in this chapter. Abraham teaches us, at least implicitly, there is some kind of moral standard outside of God’s actions, a moral standard that humans have the ability to call upon when questioning God. He rhetorically asks: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” We also learn something as to how this questioning is to proceed: Abraham humbly but boldly calls upon the Lord, even offering rhetorical questions which serve to remind the Lord of His goodness. This episode also gives hints at the possibility and nature of theology: Abraham’s response to the Lord’s intentions seems like a kind of theological response in which Abraham informs the Lord (at least so it seems) that it would not be proper for him to kill the righteous with the wicked, a response which perhaps gives part of the impetus to the “perfect being” theology we usually associate with Greek influences or the scholasticism of Aquinas or Anselm. If Abraham can do theology, and can use that theology to call God to account, perhaps this front is not as bleak as we may otherwise suppose.

Regarding our third question, how our family relationships shape our relationship with God and the kind of theology we pursue, I don’t believe this chapter gives clear suggestions in this direction. Abraham’s relationship with God still seems much different from Sarah’s relationship with God, and there is not much suggestion that they have any kind of “joint” relationship to God. Moreover, Abraham’s theological questioning of God does not involve Abraham telling God that one of the righteous men in Sodom, Lot, is his kin. All that seems salient to the Lord is righteousness, and the salience of even that feature has already been called into question. If Abraham’s familial relationships play a particular role in his relationship with the Lord or in the covenant the Lord has made with him, that role does not seem to be clearly demonstrated here. Abram apparently deals with the Lord on his own, without his wife, and without his kinsman Lot.

This conclusion serves as yet another reason to find something deeply flawed and problematic about this way of reading the chapter: I want Abraham to be the paradigm example of the centrality of faith and family. What do we do if the text simply doesn’t describe him thus, at least according to our own standards and seemingly “common sense” notions?

Through the above, my question that I hope will guide discussion for the week has become clear: “What is the ethical status of the agents of the story of Abraham, in particular of the Lord, in Genesis 18?” This question is admittedly presumptuous: who are we, and more importantly who am I, to judge God? But I sincerely hope to follow Abraham’s example in righteously questioning God, looking for the God of love in places where something different seems to appear. I hope that these comments will be understood as I intend them, that is, as an example of one flawed way of reading the scriptures, a way that I think is commonly presupposed but generally not followed through to its logical extremes. As I said above and in my email, I’m not sure how else to read such a text. I know that others have ideas in these areas, and I look forward to hearing your suggestions. I appreciate your willingness to help me work through these difficult issues and these sometimes troubling passages.

Genesis 17

2007-02-10T11:56:00.000-08:00

Genesis 17 (with thanks and apologies to Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom)

1- Walk before me / be thou perfect
“Walk before me” –
“Walk,” I’m told, connotes a way of life, a way of being – the first time Abram receives a comprehensive commandment, a commandment to live wholly in a certain manner.

Before me- Before my face, in my presence. Personally before me, a life thoroughly conditioned by the Lord’s regard, a life in his light, a life tending toward, extending toward a personal Other?

Perfect (tamim)– whole, blameless. Like the Latinate “perfect”? Self-sufficient, fulfilling his own end in the excellent activity of his own faculties, enacting in microcosm the self-contained, impersonal order of the eternal whole, the cosmos - like the classical great-souled man, like, eventually, the philosopher? Obviously not all this.

But is some naturally accessible “perfection,” self-completion, wholeness presupposed in this command? Must Abram have some perfectible being in himself, must he first be towards an implicit, inherent understanding of the goodness of the kind of being he is, before he can receive the command to walk in the “light” of a personal Being? Does righteousness, uprightness before God extend, redeem a goodness that in some way or to some degree is already meaningful to natural beings? Does grace perfect nature? (Can there be an icon without an idol? Does contract prepare/foreshadow covenant?)

(I am told, of course, that there is no equivalent to “nature”/ “physis” in Hebrew… How decisive is this? Can there yet be an implicit sense of “natural” good or fulfillment?)

Or is this idea or notion of perfection, of wholeness, equivalent to, derivative of, or strictly, necessarily, exhaustively correlated with “walking before” the Almighty? Is a way of life determined pervasively by relation to (a) personal being(s), in light or opening of His awareness alien to or supervenient upon a life aiming at some self-representable, graspable completeness, self-sufficiency?

The names are changed… but not that much, not beyond recognition.

2- I will… multiply thee exceedingly … 4- thou shalt be a father of many nations … 6- I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee… 16 she shall be a mother of nations.

Apparently God is addressing Abraham’s & Sarah’s fondest desires when he promises them fruitfulness, limitless seed, and, yes, it seems, some kind of dominion or rule – to be father/mother of nations and kings. Are these natural desires that stem from our deepest humanity? Of course we today love our children (and grandchildren), and maybe we even take some (guilty?) pleasure in ruling our little families wisely, in the self-aware prudence, the mastery of passions (our own and others’), the comprehensiveness of understanding of human types, of human needs and wants, necessary to govern a family (a business? A ward!?) – all subject to humble and prayerful recognition of limitations and need for divine guidance. But can we even grasp what the promise of limitless fruitfulness (and everlasting dominion? – D&C 121) means to Abraham, or to Joseph Smith, in his “lust for kin” (is that not R. Bushman’s characterization?).

(Pierre Manent, in The City of Man (p. 92f.), brilliantly deconstructs Adam Smith’s critique of the feudal landlord, whom Smith depicts only at the moment he is selling out his traditional privileges and responsibilities, his authority and his cares, for fungible bourgeois commodities. Why would anyone want to be a “Lord”? What a lot of trouble that must be…)

The promise of fecundity, “eternal lives” (D&C 132) seems to me to go to the heart of an LDS vision of or attunement to ultimate meaning. If there is any decisively privileged link between what is humanly (‘naturally’) graspable, representable, and what is ever-transcendent, open-ended (any passage or analogy between the “symbolic” and the “ethical”?), then it seems to me it must be somewhere in this region. (See Levinas, Totality and Infinity, on Fecundity.)

vv. 10-14, 23-27, on Circumcision.
Already a long existing practice, Kass reminds me, but always associated with rites of passage to manhood, recognition of virility. But this covenantal marking of the male member – instituted just in time for Ishmael’s rite of passage -- will be practiced on helpless infants, by (or under the supervision of) their fathers, thus indelibly associating the reproductive power with divine gifts and promises. The most awesome natural power is marked by a transcending significance, taken up in an infinite fruitfulness.

23- …in the selfsame day. Cf. 22:3- Abraham rose early in the morning….
……………………..
Well, that leaves many, even most stones yet unturned, but that’s all I can manage for now. Please correct what is here, and fill in the parts I’ve had to neglect. And I hope you can help me find ways to connect further with questions raised earlier.

Discussion summary: Reading Hagar, Gen 16

2007-02-05T15:21:00.000-08:00

I will confess, from the very beginning, that I have no idea how to summarize this discussion using Jim's (Wittgenstein's?) numerical systematization (primarily because the discussion has been overly complex this week). Better: I haven't the patience to systematize this discussion that way because it looks like it will take me another week to do so without grossly misrepresenting things. Let me take a unique approach in summarizing the discussion this week by (1) summarizing where this week's discussion stands for now, (2) trying at the same time to synthesize a lot of loose ends by going beyond this week's discussion, and (3) trying to think (originally, and perhaps well beyond this week's discussion at all) about how what we have done this week bears on the four questions that are guiding our study.

Gen 16 picks up on the theme of metaphor from previous discussions, but in a rather unique fashion: in an(other) attempt to fulfill the promises given to Abram, Sarai brings Hagar into the story as a metaphor for herself, and this complication of the story opens onto the possibility of reading this chapter in terms of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. This metaphoric surrogacy introduces (or perhaps confirms) the symbolic order for Sarai: because of the (now) symbolic structure of her selfhood, Sarai's very selfhood is "split," and the dialectic attempts to work out her self-consciousness (perhaps according to a metaphysics of presence that is highlighted again and again by the textual theme of "seeing").

This metaphoric origin (Ursprung?) of the dialectic--because it is tied to surrogate motherhood--may well equate the symbolic in this narrative with the patriarchal: the introduction of the metaphor (the symbolic) confirms (even as it obviously reorients) the "naive" patriarchy at work before its introduction. But it seems clear, in the wake of Abram's experiences with God in Gen 12 and Gen 15, that this introduction of the symbolic (parallel to the "word" of the Lord for Abram) aims at a kind of post-symbolic order, ultimately an ethical order. However, perhaps because Sarai remains within a dialectical metaphysics of presence, she does not yet experience the rupture of the symbolic by what Adam (via Lacan) calls the Real.

That Sarai does not enter the ethical realm of faith/hope/charity is highlighted by the fact that she oppresses Hagar when she sees her pregnant (this sight seems ultimately to be bound up with the nature of the slavery to which Sarai has set Hagar: surrogate motherhood). If Sarai fails to achieve the ethical, Hagar seems to come much closer with her theophany in the desert, though the heavy emphasis on seeing in this latter pericope may also suggest that she too remains within a metaphysics of presence, as might the fact that Hagar does not receive a covenant for Ishmael.

This last point, that covenant outstrips contract, seems to be one of the most promising themes, especially if it is interpreted with an eye to the three stages of the symbolic discussed (apparently) by both Lacan and Derrida: the pre-symbolic (the tautological, the naively self-identical), the symbolic (the historical, the dialectical, the economical, the "temporal"), and the post-symbolic (the ethical, the evental, the "end of history," the "spiritual" or even "typological"). If contract and covenant are thought along these lines, one might read the three stages thus: the state of nature, the contractual, the covenantal. Apparently, Gen 16 finds Sarai (at least) still within the realm of the contractual. Does it find Abram at the same stage (what is the significance of Abram's hearkening to his wife, hearing rather than seeing, and especially after the covenant discourse of Gen 15; but then see #4 below)?

Finally, a couple of thoughts about how these still open questions might be brought to bear on the four questions that guide our collective study.

1. The covenant increasingly appears to be absolutely key to the faithful relationship embodied in the figure of Abraham. In the course of this week's discussion, that covenant has taken on a clearer meaning. It might be said that the word "faithful" (along with "hopeful" and "charitable") only makes sense on the level of the covenantal (the post-symbolic level). Faith implies covenant, and that seems at the very least to mean that faith implies an orientation to the Real that disrupts the symbolic order.

2. It is not clear how we ought to think about theology after this week's discussion. Looking back, it probably would have been better if we had taken this question up at some point along the way in an explicit fashion (though perhaps it has only become interesting with the comments made over the past twenty-four hours). But at least this: it is clear that theology can only happen once the symbolic order has been introduced (it must be a response to the word, whether it does so consciously or not). Might it be said that an idolatrous theology is one that remains within the symbolic order of the contract, while an iconic theology is one that surpasses the symbolic order by speaking from the post-symbolic site of the covenant? Might it be that a righteous theology is possible precisely in its (re-)orientation to the Real that disrupts the symbolic?

3. At least one family relationship discussed in Gen 16 bears on our third question, though it is not quite clear how the relationship itself should be read into the possibility of theology. The course of the discussion seems, at least on one level, to suggest that the im/possibility of theology is a question that outstrips the family relationship, while these relationships will bear powerfully on questions of theological method. In this end, this question seems to be the one we have least engaged.

4. Our fourth question perhaps cannot be answered productively until we have taken a look at more of the Abraham narrative, but the importance of D&C 132 to Gen 16 is at least suggestive of what is coming. The metaphoric surrogacy that binds Sarai and Hagar together at the level of the symbolic was, according to D&C 132, commanded of God. This might suggest that the metaphoric/symbolic substitution performed in Gen 16 is parallel to the "word" that comes to Abram in Gen 15. A similar hand-of-the-Lord-in-everything-Abrahamic permeates the Book of Abraham: perhaps specifically LDS scripture emphasizes the fact that the symbolic order is imposed by God in an attempt to point the way to the post-symbolic? This might be confirmed by the pairings of ordinances in the temple (first and second endowments; first and second sealings; call and election and then call and election made sure, etc.). That what is to be doubled for the Latter-day Saint is an ordinance may suggest that while there are other ways to perform an iconic theology, a uniquely LDS iconic theology would involve drama, ritual, physical enactment, covenant, priesthood, etc., all under the aegis of the temple.

Reading Hagar: Genesis 16

2007-01-30T09:28:00.000-08:00

The first three of our four questions seem most relevant this week, although I will make a couple of suggestions as to how the fourth is also relevant. I see the first three as interconnected through three intertwining themes that strike me particularly as I read this chapter. To get the themes out on the table, I will state them simply and then list a series of (often leading… sorry about that) questions in order to generate some discussion on these themes (I hope, then, that my questions are not too leading, or misleading). After these three themes, I’ve written out a couple of paragraphs on some other interesting things I see in the text, for whatever they’re worth. The two intertexts open the possibility of thinking about the relevance of a uniquely LDS reading of the text.

Three philosophical themes

Verse 7 marks the very first appearance of an angel (by that name) in Genesis (there are, of course, the cherubim of the Garden story). Why would an angel show up for the first time here, of all places? And why is it that the first angel comes specifically to Hagar? How does this play into the theme of mediation that has been a question in the last two chapters (14-15)? Is it significant that Hagar considers the angel to be the Lord Himself (see verse 13)? The angel comes specifically to perform a rather common function in the scriptures, that is to announce the birth of a promised child; why does an angel perform that task? Does this bear on Joseph Smith’s reading of Hebrews 11-12, where he sees angelic visitation to be a function of the fathers turning to their sons and the sons to their fathers in the work of the covenant?

In verse 10, the already repeated promise of innumerable children is given to Ishmael, but the promise is given without the metaphorical elaborations that have appeared in chapters 13 and 15 when the promises were given to Abram. What is to be made of this non-metaphorical promise, especially since the promise is just as disruptive, so to speak, as the metaphorical promises given to Abram? If the promise goes on to use metaphor about Ishmael specifically (“a wild ass of a man”) but not about the promised multitudes of children, what can be read into that? Why is the non-metaphorical promise put in the mouth of the angel?

The chapter is punctuated by references to seeing and hearing (hearing: verses 2, 11, 15—“Ishmael” means “God hears”; seeing: verses 2, 4, 5, 13—“El-roi” means “I saw God”). How do these two themes interplay? How does seeing differ from hearing here? How does the theme of seeing play into the earlier hints of idolatry on Abram’s part? Is it significant that only Hagar is reported in the chapter as seeing? What is the significance in verse 2 of Sarai’s assuming that Abraham has seen something? How is this theme of seeing connected with the introduction of the angelic? How does hearing differ from seeing here? Is it significant that Abram is the only one reported to have “hearkened” besides the Lord Himself in this chapter? Why doesn’t the author ever use the verb to describe Hagar’s relation with the angel? Why is the Lord described as hearing but not seeing? What is the significance of seeing and hearing both being wrapped up in the names given in the chapter? Is one justified to read the body into the theme of seeing, and the “spirit” into the theme of hearing? Is there a connection between the fact that the angel is only described as seen (not heard) and the fact that the angel gives the non-metaphorical promise (metaphor can only be spoken, not shown)?

Allusions, anticipations,… types?

There are some curious parallels between this story and the Eden narrative. “And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai” (verse 2); “And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and has eaten of the tree…” (Gen 3:17). “And Sarai Abram’s wife took Hagar her maid the Egyptian, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan, and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife” (verse 3); “she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat” (Gen 3:6). Curiously, in the Sarai/Hagar narrative, this is followed by a sort of opening of the eyes: “and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes” (verse 4; compare NRSV: “and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress”). More curiously still, this echo of the “Fall” story in Gen 16 traces the development from Sarai’s inability to have children (like Eve’s inability, according to one reading—not my reading, I should probably add—of 2 Nephi 2:23) to her ability to do so (albeit through a surrogate).

More obvious, perhaps, are the anticipations in the Gen 16 narrative of the Exodus story, though things are essentially backwards. The Egyptian is the slave, and Sarai “dealt hardly” (the same Hebrew word that will appear in Exod 1:11) with her. The Egyptian, instead of the Hebrew, flees into the wilderness, apparently on the way to Egypt. If all of this constitutes a sort of reversed anticipation of the Exodus to come, it is fascinating how the story wraps up: Hagar is commanded to return to her mistress. In short, the reversal is reversed in the end, and by the Lord Himself. I’m not sure what is to be made of this reversed reversal.

Finally, the scene at the well seems to be typical. Perhaps the scene that most comes to mind is John 4, the Samaritan woman at the well with Jesus. In both the present text and John 4, the Lord engages the outcast kin. In the end, I’m not sure what can be taken from the tie between these two texts, but the connection is intriguing to me.

Intertexts

Two other books of scripture deal with this chapter in interesting ways that probably deserve mention, at least because they draw from the present text some aspects of the story that might otherwise be ignored. The first is Galatians 4:21-31, Paul’s allegorical reading of Hagar and Sarah. Verse 23: “But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise.” The distinction Paul draws is tied, of course, to the great gulf between “salvation by works” and “salvation by grace.” This suggests to me that what is at work in Gen 16 is a sort of “fulfillment of the promise by works.” In Gen 16, it is not quite clear whether this sort of an approach is condoned or condemned: on the one hand, the promise of countless seed is confirmed on Ishmael (verse 10); on the other hand, as the NRSV translates it, “He shall be a wild ass of a man, with his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him; and he shall live at odds with all his kin” (verses 11-12). My own predilection is to condemn this attempt at fulfilling the commandment one’s own way, this “fulfillment by works” business (to condemn it, perhaps, as totalitarian).

But the other intertext suggests otherwise, a text I approach only with fear and trembling, a text that for Joseph Smith himself might have been the very gift of death: D&C 132. Verse 34 there: “God commanded Abraham, and Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham to wife. And why did she do it? Because this was the law; and from Hagar sprang many people. This, therefore, was fulfilling, among other things, the promises.” Two points to raise. First, what are we to make of this reading? It is quite different, ultimately, from the most obvious reading of Gen 16. Is there some way to reconcile the two texts? Would that even be desirable? Second, did Joseph read his own experiences with Emma into this story (Emma giving certain women to Joseph as wives, and then rejecting them and demanding Joseph break off those marriages)? If so, then verses 64-65 are important as well: if “a wife… receive not this law… she then becomes the transgressor; and he [the husband] is exempt from the law of Sarah, who administered unto Abraham according to the law when I commanded Abraham to take Hagar to wife.” I’m not personally quite sure what to make of these verses, but it seems quite clear that “a uniquely Latter-day Saint” reading of Abraham has to engage them. Perhaps all of this raises at least this major question: Why was Abraham so central to Joseph’s temple/marriage revelations in Nauvoo?

Setting these two intertexts side by side, it certainly appears that there are two very different ways to read this story: it might be read on the one hand as pointing to the wrong of an attempt to fulfill the promise (to be saved?) by works, or it might be read on the other hand as an example of Abraham’s strict obedience to the word (command) of grace.

An afterthought for fun

Any thoughts on how the master-slave dialectic might be read into Hagar’s work of mothering a child for Sarai?

Summary of Genesis 15

2007-01-30T08:24:00.000-08:00

Adopting Jim's device, though certainly with less elegance and coherence, I'll attempt to summarize our discussion below.

1. Abram and the Lord converse in dialogue
1.1 Melchizedek's priestly mediation may be a necessary precursor to dialogic communication with the Lord
1.2 The metonymic locution "the word of the Lord" may suggest the introduction of a symbolic order structuring the covenant
1.3 The "cutting" of the newly symbolic covenant may enact a subject-splitting psychic exile.

2. This third (?) articulation of the covenant introduces metaphor.
2.1 The rhetorical logic of metaphor may match the covenantal logic of the interrupted patriline
2.2 The terms of the metaphor---star and dust---suggest a kind of synchronic infinity that may bear on Abram's promised "eternal increase"

3. The parameters (and perimeters) of the covenant are enlarged, specified, and delayed
3.1 Abram broaches doubt and faith in this dilatation of the covenant, and the Lord responds with a non-verbal display of divine power
3.2 The Lord may reaffirm and enlarge the covenant as Abram enlarges his concern for others

Reading Genesis 15

2007-01-22T19:50:00.000-08:00

In my tardy (but considered) opinion, our first two research questions are most relevant to this week's material, to wit, and somewhat embellished:

1. If Abraham is the paradigm of fidelity to God, then what are the essential elements of this faithful relationship? In particular, is the faithful relationship between Lord and human mediated or immediate? How do questions of faith, doubt and knowledge structure the terms of the relationship?
2. What can Abraham's relationship with God tell us about the nature and possibility of theology? In particular, are the rhetorical forms of dialogue and metaphor relevant to the particular operations of theology?

I invite your comments on these questions, as well as a number of others I have suggested in my reading notes below; as always, your own particular interests and insights are requested. Below find my inexhaustive reflections on the text.

Genesis 15
In Genesis 14, Melchizedek’s appearance introduces a priestly mediator between Abram and God Most High; in Genesis 15, however, Abram resumes direct communication with the Lord, immediate and unmediated by priest or person. Indeed, Abram’s encounter with the Lord in this chapter appears, for the first time, to be genuinely dialogic: Abram and YHWH converse in an exchange of questions and answers, requests and responses.

The temporal nature of the encounter is difficult to interpret: the Lord first comes to Abram in a vision, but it’s not clear to me whether the vision comprises the rest of the chapter; if it does, then Abram experiences an unusual sleep-within-a-dream. In any case, the conversation, whether occurring in real-time or dream-time, is narrated so as to underscore its passage through time and space. YHWH takes Abram across two crucial symbolic thresholds: the limen of his tent, in verse 5, and the setting of the sun, in verse 17. Whereas the Lord’s first utterance of the covenant in 12:1 occurs in some anarchic beginning outside of history, as Jim as suggested, the reiteration of the covenant in Genesis 15 can be understood to take place in a very different temporal mode, a here-and-now history that moves in human increments of time and space. (Alternately, I suppose, the liminal location of the encounter could be read as conferring a special ontological status of some sort on the conversation. Readers’ ~~wild speculation~~ considered opinions solicited.)

The Lord’s utterance in Genesis 15 differs rhetorically from his first pronouncement in Genesis 12, as well, most notably in the introduction of metaphor. In Genesis 13:16 the Lord says, “I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted.” A cognate simile (a species of metaphor) is introduced in in 15:5 to the same effect: “Look up at the heavens and count the stars---if indeed you can count them. … So shall your offspring be.” Dust and star as metonym for earth and heaven; earth and heaven as metaphor for Abram’s family.

Roman Jakobson, of course, has written famously on metaphor and metonymy; I know Ricouer and Derrida have also written on metaphor, though I don’t know what they’ve said; I also am absolutely ignorant of Hebrew rhetoric. If there is anything to be gathered from the appearance of metaphor in the covenant, perhaps one might begin with the trope’s logic of substitution and interruption: dust and star work as conceptual substitutes for offspring, bringing their superabundance---indeed, their unknowable superabundance---to bear on the idea of Abram’s seed. But the substitution of metaphor is accomplished by interruption, rather than by the contiguity of metonymy: star and dust are not continuous, conceptually, with offspring. Interruption, substitution---this is the vocabulary we’ve been using to talk about the Lord’s disruption of the patrilineal logic. Is there a connection? (Readers’ ~~wild speculation~~ considered opinions solicited, if the question is interesting.)

This chapter seems to introduce the problems of faith, doubt and knowledge---problems that will reappear surrounding the conception and birth of Isaac. Verse 6 tells us that “Abram believed the Lord, and he [the Lord]? credited it to him [Abram?] as righteousness.” Several verses later, however, Abram seeks a surer knowledge, asking in verse 8, “How can I know that I will gain possession of” the land? In response, the Lord directs Abram to bring him various animals, and upon Abram’s compliance the Lord puts on a miraculous show of supernatural power, assuring Abram that he can “know for certain” that his descendants will ultimately inherit the land. This is clearly a foreshadowing of the episode with Isaac later, but I have no idea what to make of the specifics. I’m certain there’s symbolic meaning to Abram’s various offerings and to the way they are prepared, described in verses 9 and 10, but I’m ignorant. (Knowledgeable readers’ insights solicited.)

Finally, something might be said about the highly atmospheric recounting of Abram’s extraordinary night vision in verse 12-21. Abram’s “deep sleep” and the “thick and dreadful darkness” that falls upon him bring to mind both Adam’s deep sleep at the creation of Eve and the darkness that blankets the formless earth at Genesis 1:1; from both darknesses YHWH brings forth light. (I don’t know the original Hebrew, so I don’t know whether these parallels are supported by the lexis.) Abram knows he has encountered the creator God: in verse 2 he addresses YHWH as “Sovereign,” the term (I think) introduced by Melchizedek at 14:19 that encompasses maker, creator, possessor, and engenderer. (Please correct me if I’m wrong here, Jim.)

It is this context of creation that YHWH gives Abram the extraordinary prophecy of the future of the great nation that will bear his name. This is the first appearance of the word “covenant”, I think, though it is by now the third or fourth iteration of the themes of inheritance and offspring. Here the Lord promises the land not to Abram himself, but to his descendants: the gift is deferred, but also defined. Abram’s descendants will displace---substitute, interrupt---the “Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.” In Genesis 13:14 and 13:17 the Lord invites Abram to claim the borders of his land by seeing and walking its perimeter, an incremental and continuous act of possession. In Genesis 15, however, YHWH installs Abram’s offspring in the land---discursively, at least---in a radically discontinuous, substitutionary fashion. Metonymy and metaphor are coming to mind here, again. Is there anything to be learned from from these differences? (Readers’ ~~considered opinions~~ wild speculations solicited.)

Summary of Genesis 13-14 Discussion

2007-01-22T15:00:00.000-08:00

1. Abram is first to leave Egypt for Canaan, a type

1.1. Being in the Promised Land requires continued work: the Promised Land is not the Garden of Eden; the idol/ fantasy is not the reality.

1.1.1.The Promised Land seems unable to support all who enter it—what does that mean?

2. Abram is the first peacemaker.

2.1. Making piece is a familial work as well as a work in the world.

2.2. Melchizedek, without lineage, is central to this work

2.2.1. It is relevant that t his is the first major departure from the KJV in the JST.

3. Abram is at the margins of the social world.

3.1 The Saints, as the anti-type of Abram, must expect also to be at the margins.

4. Because Abram has a family, he cannot avoid politics, a politics that culminates in uncalled for generosity which is, presumably, a reflection of 2, above.

Reading Genesis 13-14

2007-01-15T19:03:00.000-08:00

Let me start with questions that occurred to me as I read. Then I will make a few comments about the chapters.

Chapter 13

Verse 1: Notice the difference in the way the families are described in Genesis 12:5 and here. Does anything in these verses suggest a change in the family situation? If yes, of what sort?

Verse 2: The Hebrew used to describe how rich Abram was, translated "very," is the same term used to describe the famine in 12:10, there translated "grievous." What connection, if any, does that duplication of the word suggest? This is the first mention of money- rather than livestock-wealth. Is this something Abram acquired in Egypt? If so, was it perhaps compensation for the pharaoh's having taken Sarai? Is this part of a parallel between Abram's departure from Egypt and the later departure of Israel under Moses?

Verse 3: The KJV's "he went on his journeys" is translated more accurately elsewhere as "he went by stages." This is another parallel with Israel's exodus, the only other place we see the same term. (See, for example, Exodus 17:1 and Numbers 10:12.) What are we to make of that parallel? Why does Abram go back to the place where he had built an altar? (See Genesis 12:7-8).

Verses 5-7: What is happening to Abram’s family here? Had Abram presumed that Lot would be his heir? He has already been blessed that he will be a great nation (Genesis 12:2). What would Abram think about that blessing at this point? Might there be anything deeper to this strife than an argument over pasturage or wells? (See also verse 10 and compare Genesis 26:16-22.) Does Genesis 18:19 suggest something about the difference between Lot and Abram? Is there any connection between the story of Lot's choice and the blessing/cursed pronounced in Genesis 12:3? What kind of inheritance does Lot choose? How does that contrast with Abram's inheritance? Is Abram's peacemaking typological? (Compare Levitcus 19:17-18; Psalm 122, 133; Proverbs 3:17, 29-34; Hebrews 12:14; and James 3:17-18.)

Verses 10-13: Did Lot know what kind of men lived in the land he had chosen? Why did he choose that land? Why does the writer include an allusion to the Garden of Eden in verse 10? The Word Bible Commentary (1:297) says of verses 11-12:

The theological geography of Lot's decision is particularly interesting. The boundaries of the promised land of Canaan are defined in Num 34:2:12. It appears that the eastern frontier coincided with the Dead Sea and the river Jordan, i.e., what Gen 13 terms "the plain of the Jordan." So in picking this area to live in, Lot is moving to the edge of Canaan, if not beyond it: 10:19 certainly suggests that Sodom and neighboring cities mark the borders of the land. Lot is stepping out toward the territory that his descendants, the Moabites and Ammonites, would eventually occupy in Transjordan. Though offered a share of Canaan, he is here depicted turning his back on it.

The same writer points out that Adam, Eve, and Cain went east after sinning (Genesis 3:24, 4:16) as did the men of Babel before they started building their tower (Genesis 11:2). Is this a genuine parallel, and if it is, what are we to make of it? What is the point of foreshadowing Sodom's future (verse 13)?

Verses 14-16: Why did the Lord repeat his blessing to Abram? Why is the promise so much fuller in verse 15 than it was in 12:7? Why is verse 16 so much fuller than previous promises of descendants, such as 12:2 and 12:7? What is the point of the innumerability of Abram's seed (a point often repeated in scripture, e.g., Genesis 15:5, 28:14; Numbers 23:10; 1 Kings 3:8, Galatians 3:29; and Revelation 7:9).

Verse 17: Is this Abram's way to appropriate the land?

Chapter 14

Verses 1-12: Though the names of the kings sound authentic, we know of no historical kings to whom these kings correspond, so this is perhaps not so much a report of an actual war as it is a typological reworking of an ancient story. What might this story be intended to tell us about Abram? Is it significant that verse 2 is the first mention of war in the Bible?

Verse 12: Why might King Chedorlaomer have taken Lot captive?

Verses 13-16: I believe that verse 13 is the first use of the term "Hebrew." It wasn't a term used by Israelites to describe themselves and seems originally to have referred to those on the margins of society. Why does the biblical writer use the term here?

Verses 16-17: Notice that verse 21 seems to follow naturally after these verses, but the flow of the story, from these verses to verse 21 is interrupted by the story of Melchizedek. Why?

Verse 18-20: The name "Melchizedek" is composed of two words, mlk and tsdq, "ruler" and "righteousness" or "justice," so "Melchizedek" means "righteous ruler" or "my king is righteousness/justice." Melchizedek is the first priest mentioned in scripture. So what? He offers Abram bread and wine. Is he offering a covenant meal? What had the King of Sodom offered? (See also verse 24.) What is the point of that comparison? How does the story of Melchizedek fit into the typological cast that the writer seems to have given this story as a whole?

Verse 21: According to ancient custom, the victor had full rights to the spoils of war. What does this verse show us about the king of Sodom? What has the writer suggested by portraying the king's demand so curtly?

Verse 22: The most high God is said to be the qna of heaven and earth. The KJV translates that as the possessor of heaven and earth. Other translations take it to mean that he is the maker of heaven and earth. The word means "to acquire" or "to create" and it is also the word translated "conceive" in Genesis 4:1. Some scribes later changed qna to asa ("to make") in order to avoid the possible sexual connotations of the former. What might those connotations have originally suggested?

Verse 22-24: How does Abram’s behavior here contrast with his behavior toward Melchizedek? What is the difference?

Comments

Adam (a.k.a. "Mini-Lacan") has suggested three questions that are immediately relevant to us:

1. If Abraham is the paradigm of fidelity to God, then what are the essential elements of this faithful relationship?

2. What can Abraham's relationship with God tell us about the nature and possibility of theology?

3. How do our family relationships shape our fidelity to God and, potentially, the kind of theology we pursue?

I defer his fourth question, "In light of the above, what is unique about a Mormon understanding of Abraham?" until later, toward the end of our discussion of Abram/Abraham's story.

As to the first question: do these chapters add anything to our thinking about the essential elements of fidelity to God? In them, Abram is portrayed typologically in at least two ways: (1) as the first to make the move from Egypt to Canaan, as Israel will later, and as must every sinner; (2) as the first peacemaker (after Cain, after the Flood, after Babel).

Expanding:

1. The faithful must flee the world for the Promised Land, but on arrival they will not find the Garden of Eden. Instead, they will continue to encounter the world, but they will have power to overcome it. At the heart of overcoming the world, however, is divine covenant, the bread and wine offered by Melchizedek, the covenant with God mediated by priesthood.

2. Though the relationship of the faithful to the world may unavoidably be one of war, the relation to the family ("Lot") is one of peacemaking. One question that follows, of course, is "Who is of the family?" Lot, after all, is a nephew who has turned his back on Canaan. And Abram himself is explicitly someone on the margins of society as a whole. The question of inner and outer seems unavoidable. Is the work of peacemaking the work against the inner and the outer, or is it something else?

My first thought is that peacemaking means the work against the inner and the outer, the work to bring everyone into the family, though it seems from the beginning to have been a work done at the margins rather than at the center. Abram is at the margins, indeed, cast out. Israel has hardly been the center of the world, though medieval cartographers placed Jerusalem at the center. The Restoration remains at the margins of today's world, a tiny minority with the mission to change the world. I'm not sure how to understand the work of peace as a work that occurs at the margins, much less what it means to intend to bring all human beings into one family.

As to the second question: In other conversations, some of us have talked about the parallel between theology and psychoanalysis: theology as an interruptive practice that questions us, requiring us to be remade in new terms. Abram's story is one of being questioned, being brought up short by God's demand and being remade in response. God doesn't ask him questions, but he gives him commands that remake his life, and the story of that relationship raises questions for those who read it. Abram does theology, understands and explains his relationship to God, by living a godly life. Presumably the questions that Abram's story raises for believers are not historical and philological questions, but questions that demand a response like Abram's, a godly life. Like Abram, however, we cannot know in advance what it means to live a godly life, except to know that we will find it in covenant.

As to the third question, "How do our family relationships shape our fidelity to God and, potentially, the kind of theology we pursue?"

This is for me the most difficult of these three questions. It is obvious that Abram's relation to Lot is central. I believe that his almost unspoken relation to Sarai is also central, though I cannot yet say why because we need more text for that. In both cases, however, his relationships to his family members are hardly what we understand as good family relations. Does Abram demonstrate his fidelity to God by making peace with Lot and then by saving him from kidnapping? It seems like that is the direction to go, but I don't see how to get there. I'm interested in how others understand these things.

Discussion Summary: Genesis 11-12

2007-01-15T13:29:00.000-08:00

Discussion Question

Why are God’s first words to Abram (Gen 12.1) aimed precisely at puncturing the security and harmony of Abram’s connection to his family and homeland?

Discussion Summary

That God speaks to Abram immediately out of the void of his father’s death (11.32-12.1) appears to indicate that God intends a radical break with or reconfiguration of patriarchy. God here inserts himself into the father-son axis of the family relationship between Terah and Abram and (as we will see) he will insert himself again between Abraham and Isaac.

It should be noted that there are several textual suggestions of disruption and disorder in Terah’s house/lineage prior to God’s command to Abram to leave his father’s house (these include the premature death of Terah’s son, Haran [11.28], Terah’s own late paternity [11.26], and Terah’s decision to leave Ur [11.31]). In this sense, God’s intentional scattering of Abram might be seen as a continuation of a patriarchal breakdown that is already underway or, perhaps, as the event that actualizes the hitherto only potential break in the patriarchal order for the sake of producing a specific effect.

In light of this reading, Abram’s treatment of Sarai in Egypt (12.10-20) becomes potentially telling. Does Abram’s (mis?)treatment of Sarai on the borders of Egypt show that, contrary to God’s call, he has not yet left his father’s patriarchal house? Could Sarai function here as a type for Abram’s relationship with God? There seems to be a kind of absoluteness to Sarai: we are denied any textual information about her (where is she from? what is her lineage?) so that she appears to be outside of kinship and geographic relations. If so, then the text may indicate that Abram mistreats her (and, by extension, God?) as a kind of idol (“she is fair to look upon” [12.11]). We might also note that God’s promises come only to Abram, not to the couple (though, looking ahead, it may be important that only Sarai’s child will count as the fulfillment of God’s promise).

The most pressing question about Abram’s relation to Sarai may be this: does God’s disruption of the patriarchal axis of the family reconfigure the husband-wife axis of the family as well?

With respect to theology, the primary question appears to center on silence: what are the implications of Abram’s silence in response to God (especially in light of the scattering of language suffered in a “post” tower of Babel world)? What does his silence say about the place of language/theology in their relationship? We should note, here, the interplay between place (sham) and name (shem) in Genesis 11.1-9 and the way in which the scattering of people (Abram included) also involves a scattering of language. To be scattered from one’s “fatherland” also involves being scattered from one’s “mother tongue.” Nonetheless, God’s promise to return to Abram a “great name” (12.2) may prefigure an opening onto theology in light of the loss of fatherland and mother tongue rather than a closure of its possibility.

Apart from the importance of God’s intervening call in Abram’s relation to his family, chapters 11 and 12 also raise important questions about the relation between the family, the polis, and the individual. How are we to relate the ruin of “urban transcendence” in 11.1-9 with God’s own disruption of the order of patriarchy in 12.1-3? Is family being privileged over city? If so, what kind of family and in what kind of way? Does the disruption of patriarchy open beyond the family onto a political responsibility (and political theology) or does it indicate a kind of regrounding of political relations in a reconfigured family (with its own attendant familial theology)?

Finally, it is important to note the use of the imperfect tense in Genesis 12.1: “Now the Lord had said unto Abram . . .” The use of this tense appears to indicate that God’s call, though textually contiguous with the death of Terah, preceded these events in some way. This may indicate that there is a kind of immemorial or meta-historical dimension to God’s call, that there is a way in which God’s call has always already preceded whatever historical events take shape in light of it. Further, it may also be connected with the way in which chapters 11 and 12 operate as a textual pivot in Genesis from pre-historical cosmogony (Adam to Noah) to a more properly historical “ethnogony” (Abraham and his posterity).

In light of the discussion, we might reformulate this past week’s discussion question in the following way: in what way does God’s intervention in history untie and/or re-knot the relations between God, family, community, and the individual?

Genesis 11-12

2007-01-09T03:36:00.000-08:00

Getting started is always the most difficult part of any project. I imagine that after this week we'll already have a clearer idea of what particular kinds of questions and issues interest us as a group. For now, in order to get the ball rolling, I'd like to raise a specific question about Genesis 11-12. However, especially this week, we should feel free to let the discussion roam in a variety of directions including general questions about the reading, the project, technical questions, etc.

Also, Rosalynde previously asked about what translation we'd be using. I suggest that we begin with the KJV but freely draw upon any other translations we find useful and upon the Hebrew itself where possible or profitable. I've found Robert Alter's very literal and literary translation of and commentary on Genesis to be especially helpful and may often come back to it (Alter's famous The Art of Biblical Narrative is well worth taking a look at if you're unfamiliar with it).

I'd like to begin, then, with a question that I hope will not be trivial and that I hope will open in several directions at once.

Discussion Question

Why are God's first words to Abraham/Abram (12.1 - "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house") aimed precisely at puncturing the security and harmony of Abraham's connection to his family and homeland? And, is this a fair way to pose the question?

Notes and Additional Questions

Genesis 11.1-9, It's useful to include all of chapter 11 in our reading for this week (even though it does not directly concern Abraham) because the story of the tower of Babel functions as a useful foil for the opening of chapter 12 and the question I pose above. Just as the builders of the tower were scattered and their language was confounded, Abraham is also scattered by God from his native land (and his native tongue?) and is mute in response to his scattering (he makes no reply to God). However, where in the first instance this scattering is experienced as a curse and as what ruins the attempt of the tower-builders to "make a name" (11.4) for themselves, for Abraham the dislocation comes as a blessing by means of which he is blessed and his "name will be made great" (12.2). Abraham is here promised the very thing the tower-builders wanted (a name that would last), but he is promised it by the very means that denied it to the tower-builders. Or, we could say, the tower-builders want a name so that they won't be scattered, but this is the very thing that prompts God to scatter them.

Genesis 11.32-12.1, We should also note that God speaks to Abraham immediately following Abraham's father's death. ". . . Terah died in Haran. And the Lord said to Abraham . . ." This connection doesn't strike me as accidental (God speaking to Abraham out of the void of the father's death) and seems connected to the way that God is dislocating Abraham from hearth and home (though we perhaps need to be careful in talking about Abraham in this way due his relatively nomadic lifestyle - he certainly doesn't have a mortgage).

Genesis 12.4, As I've already noted, Abraham, living in a world that has seen its language broken (as Alter translates 11.1, what has been lost is "one set of words" or the possibility of univocity), is mute in response to the blessing. He simply "departs." Does this loss of univocity, the dislocation of home and language, spell the end of theology (so that we must be mute), or does the possibility of a relation to God (and perhaps the possibility of theology) open only in the light of plurivocity and the loss of general equivalence?

Genesis 12.7, Abraham goes without knowing where he is going: the place is specified only when he arrives there without knowing it. Does this also say something about the im/possibility of theology?

12.10-20, Alter notes that this pericope has long been interpreted as a miniature version of the exodus (going down into Egypt because of a famine, the plagues on Pharaoh's house because he splits a family, his cry for Abraham and Sarah to "get out!"). Can we milk this tale of tangled family relationships for any useful information in addressing the general question I pose above?

12.19, Pharaoh's words "Get out!" echo God's opening words to Abraham (12.1) of "get thee out of the land," so that Abraham is reunited with Sarah only at the price of being dislocated once again.

Connections to More General Questions

My discussion question relates most clearly to our third key question: "How do our family relationships shape our fidelity to God and, potentially, the kind of theology we pursue?" It is clear, I think, that Mormon theology requires us to think the family as central to religious experience as such. The difficulty is that Abraham's story (at least thus far) is no story about protecting the sanctity of hearth and home. There does not seem to be a straightforward way of finding in Abraham a paradigm for our everyday conservative Christian discourse about the theological centrality of families. Abraham is, I think, central to trying to think about the way in which God, family, and individual are essentially tied to together in a religious knot, but I suspect that these relationships may get knotted together in a way that is, at least at first, somewhat surprising and (perhaps) not at all conservative.

In addition, the function of language in these two chapters, highlighted by the inclusion of the story of the tower of Babel and its parallels in the opening of Abraham's story, offer some material for thinking about the possibility of theology in general as indicated in the second key question: "What can Abraham's relationship with God tell us about the nature and possibility of theology?" However, they don't appear to be encouraging.

The Mormon Theology Seminar

2007-01-05T13:39:00.000-08:00

This experimental seminar in Mormon theology is a product of the fact that I am now officially middle-aged.

I turned thirty this last year, completed my doctoral work in philosophy, started a job teaching philosophy, and welcomed our third child. Amid the pleasant chaos, my thoughts turned to the question of what on earth I ought to do with my professional life (at least the part of that professional life that is interested in Mormon theology). A few weeks before my birthday, while reading a book about the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, I had an epiphany.

I was reading about Lacan's way of grouping psychoanalysts into temporary and tightly focused study groups of 5-6 people (cartels or seminars) organized around answering a particular question (theoretical or practical) and aimed at producing a consensus report that could then be distributed to the larger body of psychoanalysts as a basis for further discussion and innovations in practice.

No stranger to megalomania, the possibility of doing something similar with Mormon theology struck me like a bolt of lightning.

Here's what I saw.

I saw dozens (and hundreds) of these seminar groups, loosely organized around an extra-instutional hub, convening for sixth months at a time and reporting over the course of the next fifty or a hundred years about the practice and foundations of Mormon theology.

I saw the accumulation of insight and the cross-fertilization of discourses and disciplines in the production of consensus reports about relatively narrow and (at least provisionally) answerable questions.

I saw books and whole series of books published containing these reports and the individual contributions that they spawn.

I saw online groups and summer theology seminars with senior scholars.

I saw an immense archive of disciplined theological discussion, organized and searchable according to topic and discipline, that could form the foundation for the emergence of Mormon theology as a unique discourse with its own proper methods and unique subject matter.

I saw Mormon theology, rounding its two-hundredth birthday, growing-up. Lacan on the brain, I penciled the name: the Mormon Theology Seminar.

The seminar's motto could be summarized in the following way: Mormon theology as common, progressive, and cumulative.

'Common' meaning that we're looking to overcome the isolation and idiosyncrasy of Mormon theology by finding a way to engage in the work as a shared project that produces some consensus. 'Progressive' meaning that we're looking to ask relatively narrow questions that are at least provisionally answerable/decidable so that some kind of general progress can be made in the field. And 'Cumulative' meaning that we're looking for a way to preserve and build on the answers and solutions already proposed (both within a given reading group/seminar on a weekly basis and, over time, between seminars).

Now such a thing (at least on a large scale) may well be impossible - and it may certainly even turn out to be undesirable - but the aim of this experiment is to find out.

When Jim Faulconer suggested to me the possibility of collecting a number of essays devoted to relatively sophisticated Mormon readings of Abraham, I counter-suggested that the project he had in mind might serve very nicely as a kind of trial balloon for the idea sketched above. We settled on a broad topic, came up with a list of potential participants, and here we are.

Now we'll see what happens next.

Sketching a (Provisional) Methodology

2007-01-05T12:50:00.000-08:00

Jim Faulconer and I discussed the various ways in which we might conduct this experimental e-seminar (list-servs, discussion boards, blogs) and settled on the idea of using a blog (remarkably like this one) that would be publicly readable but not open to public comment. We hope that this will allow us to do several things simultaneously: (1) generate some interest and buzz for what we're doing and the way that we're doing it (feel free to contact me by email if, as an outside reader, you'd like to express any interest or ask any questions), (2) preserve a public record of our work, and (3) avoid having our relatively narrow and tightly focused discussion sidetracked by well-meaning third parties.

The first step, then, was to select a topic and come up with a short list of key texts. We chose 'Reading Abraham' as our topic and selected Genesis 11-25, Abraham 1-5, Soren Kierkegaard's Fear & Trembling, and Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death as our texts. We plan to read each in their entirety and hope to do so with unusual care.

The second step was to formulate a couple of key, general questions to guide the weekly discussions and structure the common report we plan to compose at the conclusion of the seminar. The four general questions (also visible in the sidebar) are:

(1) If Abraham is the paradigm of fidelity to God, then what are the essential elements of this faithful relationship?

(2) What can Abraham's relationship with God tell us about the nature and possibility of theology?

(3) How do our family relationships shape our fidelity to God and, potentially, the kind of theology we pursue?

(4) Finally, in light of the above, what is unique about a Mormon understanding of Abraham?

The third step was to develop a way to structure and orient the weekly discussions. We began by dividing the proposed reading material into weekly segments over six+ months (the reading schedule is also visible in the sidebar).

Each week a different member of the seminar is assigned to lead the week's discussion. That week's discussion leader is responsible for formulating a particular, narrow question that directly concerns the week's reading.

The discussion leader then composes an initial post that opens the discussion by: (1) sharing their specific question about the reading, (2) offering a brief explanation of how they think answering this question may contribute to answering one of the more general questions that interests us, and (3) sketching any additional sub-questions about particular verses they feel might be helpful for opening up the discussion. The week's discussion is then carried out in the comments section of this initial post.

At the week's close, the discussion leader formulates an additional post that briefly summarizes the group's answers that developed over the course of the week (noting points of consensus and, possibly, dissenting opinions) and tries especially to explicitly apply the week's findings to answering one or more of our four general questions.

This methodology is, of course, entirely provisional and may require some adaptation on the fly. I worry, in particular, that this format might be too restrictive - but (at least for now) I worry more that we might not get anywhere without some relatively strict discipline. Again, we'll see what happens and suggestions are always welcome.