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Deep Symbols and Mythic Imagination in the Hermeneutics of Creation Texts

2009; Routledge; Volume: 20; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09596410902982869

1469-9311

Geraldine Smyth,

Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies

Abstract This article reflects on creation through the lens of different traditions of Christian scholarship, and argues for a returning of the theology of creation to its rightful place at the centre of theological discourse about God's relationship with the world—intrinsically linked to the economy of salvation and not in opposition to it. It posits a necessary re-visioning of the relationship between humanity and other-than-human creation via a re-evaluation of the epistemological function of symbol and myth, and a re-examining of the governing principles within myth typologies and their implicit axioms within creation theology. The hermeneutical insights of philosopher Paul Ricoeur and biblical exegete Claus Westermann are brought into conversation. Building on the Ricoeurian epistemological axiom that ‘the symbol gives rise to thought’, the article avers the creation imaginary as a deep and formative symbol of God's free and loving purposes enacted through different and even contesting cultures and traditions and within the whole cosmos. In imaginative dialogical rereading, the community of faith can be open to God's free and loving relationship with all creation, thus also participating in the divine work of renewing the face of the earth. Acknowledgements This article is based on a paper originally presented at the conference Text and Interpretation: the Bases for Christian–Muslim Engagement, held in Birmingham, June 2008. This was the first in the Shi’a Muslim–Christian Hermeneutics Dialogue Series, 2008–2010, that is organized between the University of Birmingham, the Iranian Institute of Philosophy, Monash University, Australia, Shahid Beheshti University, Iran, and the University of Waikato, New Zealand. The overall title of the series is Text, Tradition and Identity: Issues of Interpretation in Christian–Muslim Engagement. Notes In sections below, I both draw on and develop earlier work (Smyth, Citation1995, pp. 176–193). For a more systematic treatment of the understanding of creation within Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, see Burrell, Citation1993, pp. 39–46, 161–184. Westermann notes that recital of myths of origins provides reassurance and a sense of a stable universe, manifesting less an interest in origins than concern for security. Indicating that there tend to be many more stories of the creation of the one (person) and that these are older than stories of the creation of the many (world), he links this to the emergence of ‘creation faith’, and demonstrates that that the biblical ‘P’ tradition is embedded in a long pre-history. Mircea Eliade (Citation1975, pp. 1–38 and passim) sees myths as sacred, exemplary and significant, and as relating to origins. Other typologists instance a similar pattern: Claus Westermann instances four main types: 1) creation by birth; 2) creation through struggle (paralleling Ricoeur's ‘Drama of Creation’ type); 3) creation as fashioning or making; and 4) creation through utterance/word. He condenses these to a) creation as birth (prevalent in Egypt and Mesopotamia) and b) creation as act (Westermann, Citation1984, pp. 26ff.). Adrio König speaks of ‘various concepts of creation’ such as, act, conflict, word, origin, and birth (König, Citation1988, pp. 70–75), and posits classification by 1) word, 2) work, 3) out of water, 4) out of nothing (pp. 101ff.). He exposits the purposes and limitations of each, and argues ultimately for an interweaving of these and related types in the foundations of a creation theology. One can contend that, just as biblical writers dared to appropriate creation patterns from other nations in avowing God's sovereignty, there is an implied need for communities of faith today to grapple with underlying meanings in Indigenous and other symbol structures which express and evoke reverence, otherness and interrelationship. The Adamic and the Exiled Soul myths sometimes colluded in the direction of transcending nature or in the harking back to a golden age of harmony. Mircea Eliade is also apropos here (1983, pp. 288–296); Eliade is doubly useful in the way he draws correlations between the Genesis story, with its symbols of monster (serpent) and tree of life, which figure in various traditions, and the central Christian symbol of salvation—the Cross (pp. 292–293). (See also Eliade, Citation1972.) Westermann notes that ‘P’ also uses the simple word ‘make’: ‘What is peculiar to the creation faith cannot be compassed in a mere word … The priestly writing in its reflection on creation, resumes more ancient and more primitive layers of tradition which spoke simply of “making” or “forming”. The priestly writer subsumes rather than rejects this primitive manner of speaking’ (Westermann, Citation1974, p. 115). Cf. Adrio König who, while assuming that bara' is the cardinal biblical word for God's creative work, argues against this being used to justify creation out of nothing. He cites its usage in other contexts, namely Psalm 104, where it refers to God's continuing care, or Isaiah 48.7, where it is linked to Israel's return from exile. Thus, creatio ex nihilo is an ecclesiastical and historical formulation (signifying God's freedom and omnipotence), rather than an ontological formula (König, Citation1988, p. 121). See Buttrick, Citation1962, entries: ‘Blessedness’, ‘Blessings’ (vol. 1, pp. 445–449); ‘Covenant’ (vol. 1, pp. 714–723); ‘Creation’ (vol. 1, pp. 725–732); ‘Spirit’ (vol. 4, pp. 432–434); ‘Word’ (vol. 4, pp. 868–872). ‘Ultimately,’ according to Long, creation out of nothing ‘emphasizes that the creation is not a mere ordering … but has come forth as a powerful religio-magical evocation from a powerful supreme being’ (Long, Citation1987, p. 95; see also Eliade, Citation1959, p. 65). Catherine Keller (Citation2003, pp. 3–5 and 25ff.) represents an eco-feminist reading that remains exegetically faithful to Genesis 1, but radically questions the rationalist fear of chaos (tehoma) lurking behind the typical ex nihilo claims (pp. 3–10 and 25ff.). She challenges the ‘orthodoxies of nothing’ associated with fixed traditions that portray tehoma as ominous, empty void, rather than a divinely generative ground of life (tohu va bohu). Drawing on biblical hermeneutics, process theology, literary theory and Prigogine's ‘chaos theory’, she argues for an alternative reconstruction from the margins of Jewish and Christian creation tradition as key to an ideological and theological liberation from the biblical legitimizing of hegemonic oppression—colonial, racist and eco-destructive—signalling a more profound avowal of transcendent mystery. This augurs an imaginative revitalizing of creation theology aligned to the soteriological transformation of society and cosmos. Jürgen Moltmann in his magnum opus, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation, avers that although the word bara' is ‘the unique word for the divine creation, [it] is used much more frequently in the Bible for God's creation of liberation and salvation in history than for the initial creation of the world’ (Moltmann, Citation1985, p. 208). Eliade comments on the combat between Marduk and Tiamet as a repeated ceremonial in Middle Eastern rituals, whereby creation and liberation became present again. From this perspective, ‘[t]he combat, the victory and the Creation took place at that instant, hinc et nunc’ (Eliade, Citation1959, p. 77). ‘Re-generation’ and ‘healing’ were achieved by return to the time of ‘origins’ (Eliade, Citation1959, pp. 77–85). The epic confrontation between Elijah with his God Yahweh and the false prophets of Mount Carmel with their Baal, dramatically illustrates this contrast (1 Kings 18.20–40). Westermann, from a soteriological perspective, distinguishes such ‘blessings’ from God's ‘saving action’. ‘The blessing is effective in the quiet steady march of growth, expansion, prosperity and fertility … no particular accomplishments to be noted … birth, growth, maturing, begetting manifest God's power at work … the basic structures of the genealogies in Gen. 1–11 treats of the effectiveness of God's blessing’ (Westermann, Citation1978, p. 17). A hermeneutic retrieval of this view of ‘blessing’ helps to reforge the broken connection between creation and salvation. For example, Q 21.30: ‘Do not the Unbelievers see that the heaven and the earth were joined together (as one unit of Creation), before We clove them asunder? We made from water every living thing. Will they not then believe?’ (Ali, Citation2000, p. 265). The symbolic role of ritual and liturgy as the celebration of ‘God's transforming action’ must also be emphasized in terms of its potential to integrate the ex nihilo and continua symbolizations and as the way of enabling believers to enter into the continuing act of God's creative love. In response to the human exploitation of nature and in promoting an ecological interpretation of nature as the arena of God's continuing revelation, religious communities can encourage liturgical and ritual celebration of the creation story and of the graciousness of creation as a ‘making present’ of this in our own day. Much, however, remains to be done, drawing from our respective faith traditions of festival, rites of protection and of renewal, while resisting dualistic separations of sacred and secular. A re-vitalization of a sacramental epistemology is needed in respect of whatever times and places we view as ‘sacred’, that awakens us to the sacredness of all time and all life as created by God. There is surely a theological and a moral basis for interreligious reflection on ecological realities and threats, in the light of our shared and differing readings of the creation traditions. Westermann notes the precedent for the conjoining of creation and flood stories (as in the Gilgamesh epic) as witnessing together the relationship between primeval event and present history. Thus, it is a once for all event while still retaining its significance for the present. There is not time here to follow this trajectory in terms of the ‘universalist’ approach indicated earlier with respect to the Noahite Laws. These concretized the human response to God's promise in terms of laws enjoined not only on Jews but on all people who seek the one God and desire to live upright lives (see Sperber, Citation2008). On the structural and symbolic relationships between cosmic beginnings and endings, see Eliade's chapter on Eschatology and cosmogony (Eliade, Citation1975, pp. 54–74); also, Ricoeur: ‘[t]he great myths are at once myths of the beginning and of the end’ (1978, p. 56). For an ecological theological exploration of this area, see Primavesi, Citation1991. Elsewhere, Ricoeur differentiates between evil as blame and evil as lament: ‘The whole enigma of evil may be said to lie in the fact that, at least in the traditions of the West, we put under the same terms such different phenomena as sin, suffering, and death’ whereas these belong in distinct categories, ‘that of blame and that of lament’ (Ricoeur, 1986, p. 68). Without such a distinction, the notion of tragedy is subsumed into the ethical, and there is a loss of the communal and the cosmic in our hermeneutics of evil. He observes, ‘[t]he function of the tragic is to question self-assurance, self-certitude, one's critical pretensions, we might even say the presumption of the moral conscience that is laden with the entire weight of evil’ (Ricoeur, Citation1978, p. 56). Additionally, this myth over time drew into itself the dualistic and anthropocentric tendencies from the ‘Exiled Soul’ myth, and the ‘Tragic God’ myth of Greek traditions, in a way that denigrated matter and relativized earth. It later combined with the hierarchical cosmology of the Greeks, in the presupposed domination of higher levels over lower—spirit over matter, man over woman, humanity over animals—and construed matter in static categories. Cf. also Eliade (Citation1972, pp. 65–71), who draws lines of connection in Patristic hermeneutics between ‘nostalgia for Paradise’ and a hierarchical order in creation (Genesis 2.19), where Adam's naming of the animals was viewed as ‘equivalent to ruling over them’ (p. 66). Eliade makes a telling comment too on ‘the ascensional symbolism of Christian mysticism’ in which the ‘Ladder of Paradise’ plays a leading part (pp. 66–67). He underlines that trouble needs to be taken ‘to understand the ideology that underlies all these manifestations’, if an objective view is to be achieved (pp. 70–71). Gabriel Daly (Citation1988, p. 184) analogously cautions that a purely ethical view of sin will often find a counterpart in a ‘penal or forensic view of Redemption’. I am indebted to Peter Schüttke for pointing me to this aspect of Ebach's work. See Daly's chapter, ‘How original is sin?’ (Daly, Citation1988, pp. 114–130). Certainly, the quality of artistic portrayal of this scene in different eras betrays a sentimental and static quality that does justice neither to a tragic nor to an eschatological horizon. One such example is the Quaker Edward Hicks' painting, ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’, where the artist portrays the treaty-signing between William Penn and native Americans (1683–1750) in a primitively romantic setting of lions and lambs, cattle and goats, girls and boys, rather solemnly disposed on a bank of the River Delaware (reproduced in Comstock, Citation1976, p. 62). Brueggemann has demonstrated that this in fact need not happen; that the shalom symbolization can open in two directions merging either with the ‘royal consciousness’ promoting stability, continuity and an ethic for the ‘haves’, or in flow with the discontinuities of the Exodus symbolization with its promise of liberation for the ‘have-nots’. König also cites Ludwig (Citation1973, p. 352, n. 47). Very interestingly, according to König, the writer of Deutero-Isaiah ‘[a]t the outset uses creation terminology to describe redemption, but eventually he calls this redemption a new creation—something that Trito-Isaiah emphasizes (65:17–19)’ (König, Citation1988, p. 58). Cf. Richard Kearney Citation(1988). Kearney, himself a scholar of Ricoeur, in his chapter on ‘The Hebraic imagination’ observes: ‘The story of imagination is as old as the story of creation itself’ (p. 39). Kearney comments upon the main Hebraic term for imagination—yetser, signifying creation, and he reflects on the Adamic myth in terms of ‘the good and evil yetser’ (p. 39). Ricoeur's influence is visible in Kearney's observation: ‘The freedom to choose between good and evil, and to construct one's story accordingly, is thus intimately related to the yetser as a passion for the possible: the human impulse to transcend what exists in the direction of what might exist’ (p. 42, emphasis added). There is, in other words, a nice conjunction here between creation, imagination and the way of transformation.