The Identity of God: Trinity

The Christian embrace of monotheism and creation ex nihilo was not an entirely straightforward development. While the overall direction was clear enough from the start, there were indications that the end was not a foregone conclusion. For example, Origen, whom Gilson credits in his monumental History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages with the clearest presentation of creation ex nihilo, in fact held that the cosmos is eternal. A god who creates an eternal world on a Neoplatonic model is problematic at best, from a Christian perspective, since the entire conception has its origin in the Greek view of the gods and man as parts of one organic whole. And Charles Norris Cochrane, in his classic study, Christianity and Classical Culture, notes that both Clement of Alexandria and Origen exhibit a fundamental Neoplatonic influence:

Creation Ex Nihilo In Early Christian Thought

Our position is that creation ex nihilo is a fundamental insight into the structure of reality and that it is essentially unique to Israelite religion.  This insight stands as opposed to the conception of origins in traditional thought (Eliade's "archaic ontology"), which portrayed the origins as a shaping of preexisting matter by a god or gods. This insight did not develop from Israel's roots in archaic ontology until relatively late in the pre-Christian history of Israelite thought—shortly before the time of Jesus. Further, we will contend that creation ex nihilo became absolutely fundamental to Christian thought from its earliest times.

In reviewing the New Testament evidence, we pointed out that these early writers were primarily concerned with the person of Jesus and the significance of his life and message. Nevertheless, we concluded that the Christian view of God's basic identity--from Apostolic times--focused on God as Creator and that this view had turned decisively toward an explicit doctrine of creation ex nihilo. We will now survey the evidence from the early Christian writers of the first three centuries, in support of our contention that the idea of creation ex nihilo had a fundamental, formative influence on the early development of Christian thought, setting it on a course which it has followed ever since.

The Identity of God: Creator

We have followed Mark Smith's study of the development of monotheism in Israelite religion and have seen that monotheism eventually developed under the pressure of historical challenges to the continued survival of Israelite political entities. In the face of the overwhelming might of the Mesopotamian and, later, Hellenistic World Empires, Israelite thinkers engaged in a type of ideological warfare in which Yahweh—previously a national god, one of many in the West Semitic pantheon under the fatherhood of El—developed into the supreme god and eventually the only god. However, this ideological victory of Yahweh did not save the Israelite kingdoms in historical existence and it therefore became necessary to articulate the ultimate vindication of Yahweh's people as a future event. We summarized Smith's account as follows:

Eliade: From Theogony to Philosophy

While Frank Moore Cross' account of the transition from archaic ontology is more theoretically complete, including a fuller account of the relationship between the theogonic and the cosmogonic gods and myths (see here and here), in Myth and Reality (1963) Mircea Eliade offers his own analysis of this important issue in his characteristically compressed style. Eliade's focus is on the process of demythicization and the survival of myth in "philosophy."

Eliade begins by referring to the process by which the “olden gods,” the Creator gods, lose their place in the cult and become marginalized, replaced by the young storm and warrior gods, such as Ba'l, Marduk, Zeus and later Yahweh.

Even when his name is still remembered—Anu of the Mesopotamians, El of the Canaanites, Dyaus of the Vedic Indians, Ouranos of the Greeks—the Supreme Being no longer plays an important role in religious life and is but little represented in mythology. The passivity of Ouranos as deus otiosus is plastically expressed by his castration... El yields the primacy to Ba'al as Anu does to Marduk. Except for Marduk, all these Supreme Gods are no longer “creative” in the active sense. They did not create the World, they only organized it and assumed the responsibility for maintaining order and fertility in it.. Primarily, they are Fecundators, like Zeus or Ba'al who, by their hierogamies with the Earth goddesses ensure the fertility of the fields and the abundance of harvests. (109)

The result of the replacement of the Creator god is that attention in myth is shifted from the ultimate origins to the activities of these young gods:

The accent is now on what happened to the Gods and no longer on what they created. To be sure, there is always a more or less clearly “creative” aspect in every divine adventure—but what appears more and more important is no longer the result of the adventure but the sequence of dramatic events that constitute it. The countless adventures of Ba'al, of Zeus, of Indra, or those of their colleagues in the respective pantheons, represent the most “popular” mythological themes. (110)

This state of affairs proved unsatisfying and even unedifying to the elite thinkers. This is most evident in Greece and in India (Eliade neglects to mention the Israelite prophets), but it is attested in many other societies to varying degrees. The result is the process of demythicization that we have already discussed, which leads to a paradoxical conclusion:

The Early Development of Greek Thought

Demythicization—a term that Mircea Eliade uses—was a movement that gained significant cultural momentum in Greece. Eliade uses this term to refer primarily to the intellectual reaction against the literary myths concerning the gesta of the cosmogonic gods--the young gods. Whereas the cultic devotions of popular Greek religion dated to time immemorial, an intellectual elite began to view the adventures and misadventures of the young gods, especially in their more purely literary elaborations, as unseemly and absurd. Increasingly attempts were made, beginning with the Ionian thinkers of Asia Minor, to find a single unifying principle for the cosmos. Their efforts of these thinkers are characterized by intellectual passion and reforming zeal, including the rejection of mythical accounts of the gods. Nevertheless, as we will see, their thought remains clearly linked to the archaic ontology. 

The same is true of the rejection of the “pagan idols” by certain of the Israelite "prophetic" thinkers. Their scorn for "idols" was directed at deities such as Ba'l and the mother goddesses, who were the Israelite/Middle Eastern counterparts to the cosmogonic young gods of Greece--Zeus and the Olympians. Initially we find Yahweh subsuming the roles of all other gods, including winning the cosmic victory over Leviathan the sea monster. However, these mythic allusions to Yahweh's past as a fairly conventional Middle Eastern storm and warrior god gradually atrophy into literary convention that appears to lack cultural roots, as the intellectuals develop a “higher” conception of divinity (cf., especially, our discussion of Mark Smith's work on these topics.). On the other hand, the 'olden gods' of the theogonic myth, who made the world in illo tempore, continue under various guises in Israelite thought. Of special importance, in Genesis 1 we find water and breath/wind/spirit, the unformed and earth, light/dark, day/night together with God “in the beginning.” But for the Israelite thinkers God with his word is master of all that exists; God is seen as a person, but one with no generative origin, who is increasingly seen to be independent of the universe. The Greek thinkers, on the other hand, accept almost as a given that the cosmos is part of an eternal process that is all embracing and includes both the gods and the world of men in one cosmos.

In contrast with the “attenuated” survival of the olden gods in Israelite thought, the pairs of theogonic gods played a more central role in Greek thought in the development of what we now call philosophy. Frank Moore Cross contrasted the Greek “transformation” of theogony into cosmology with the Israelite transformation of theogony into the “monotheistic creation story of Genesis 1.” As Cross recognized, the Genesis 1 account functions as a cosmology, but it differs from the Greek cosmology in that Yahweh is not world immanent in the manner of the Greek gods—and ultimately Yahweh became a truly creative god. In contrast, the Greek thinkers sought among the older theogonic gods for a principle or source of the cosmos, be it “water,” “air,” “the boundless,” “fire,” “being,” etc. As Cross notes:

It is not by chance that in the proto-philosophical speculations of the pre-Socratics of the Milesian school, lists of opposites played a fundamental role. One thinks particularly of the pairs cold (wind/air) and hot (fire), wet (water) and dry (earth), which separate out of the substratum 'the Unbounded' (apeiron) in the thought of Anaximander. The abstraction vividly reflected in the theogonic genre of gods no doubt gave impetus to philosophical abstraction and classification. In any case, the linkage and continuity between theogonic speculation and cosmological speculation of the Milesian school is difficult to deny. As for the substratum of Thales (primordial water [Chaos]), of Anaximander (the Unbounded [apeiron]), and of Anaximines (air-wind-vapor), all are found in the theogonies of Phoenicia and Egypt. (81)

The difference between the Greek and Israelite thought—for there is a difference and it is a great difference—is that Israelite thought led in Christianity to a focus on the very being of these theogonic realities, their act of existing, whereas Greek thought focused on their conceptual content. In this sense, as Eliade wrote, Plato truly remains the great philosopher of archaic ontology, a profoundly conservative figure, whereas Thomas Aquinas is the thinker who develops the latent tendencies of Israelite thought to their fullest potential.

Frank Moore Cross: Theogony, Cosmogony and Philosophy

Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic

We have previously had occasion to note the distinction that Frank Moore Cross draws between two types of creation myths: theogony and cosmogony. Cross first addressed this distinction in his classic Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (CMHE, 1968). Cosmogonic myths are those that deal with the establishment of the world order, and the cosmogonic gods are those that feature in cultic worship (the Olympian gods, for example). In the ancient Middle East, from Egypt to Mesopotamia—but also including the Greeks--cosmogonic myths took the characteristic form of a struggle in which a young generation of gods overcame the “olden gods” and as a result of this victory established the world order and, most especially, kingship both among the gods and among men. (The relation of the cosmogonic creation myth to Eliade's archaic ontology is clear.)

Death and Immortality

Death has always presented the ultimate challenge to man's understanding. Most cultures have had some notion, however vague, of a continuing life of the human person after physical death. This question takes on greater urgency, however, when viewed from the perspective of justice. As we have seen, archaic man seeks to live a life that conforms to the laws of the universe. Since all beings are seen to behave in an ordered fashion according to the laws of their being or nature, man too should do what is proper to human nature and avoid acts that are contrary to his nature. This is the importance of myth and ritual: the stories and actions involve the repetition of archetypal acts by which the the order of the universe was brought about in illo tempore, and by recollection and repetition of those archetypal patterns archaic man hopes to conform himself to the divine or heavenly realm of order and preserve himself from the chaos of disorder. The tension involved in this, of course, is that while the natural world conforms to the archetypal order without conscious effort, man must plumb the depths of his own being, his nature, to understand what the true order of human nature is and he must also overcome unruly impulses of his own being in order to conform to that true order. This true order constitutes the good for man.

Mark Smith: From Scriptures to Bible

We are now reaching the end of Mark S. Smith's The Memoirs of God, but Smith adds a “postscript” - Biblical Memory between Religion, Theology and History - in which he attempts to address some of the issues that he has inevitably raised in the course of the book but has not yet discussed. Smith's concerns center around the nature of revelation.

Biblical Narrative and Systematic Theology

Smith begins by noting that, in the Bible, Israel generated a “master narrative” of God's relations with man, running from Genesis through the books of Kings. As this narrative came to be recognized as “scripture,” i.e., became “the Bible,” it was also transformed from Israel's traditions into what Smith has termed the “memoirs of God.” But this new development could not hide the past, nor the highly complex way in which the individual narratives came into being and were later incorporated into a master narrative:

This master narrative was modified as it went on, with older modifications overwritten by later ones. The modified biblical narrative often left vestiges of older versions of the past, issuing in a text with a dialectic between the master narrative and other earlier, or even contemporary, conflicting versions. Israel's representation of its past in the Bible also incorporates competition and compromise over the meaning of that past. What becomes recognized as revelation is more than a single revelation about the past. (161)

Obviously, to enshrine such narratives as the “word of God” presents theoretical problems, not the least of which is: what could God have intended by this procedure, and how are humans to decide among the conflicting versions and representations of God's relationship with man?

Mark Smith: Memory and Amnesia in the Israelite Scriptures

Chapter Four of Mark Smith's The Memoirs of God, “The Formation of Israel's Concepts of God: Collective Memory and Amnesia in the Bible,” is dense and difficult. Smith is attempting to deal with the issue of historicity in the Israelite scriptures:

What are we biblical scholars dealing with in the Bible, what or who are we as we deal with it, and what means can we deploy to plumb the difficulties in these questions and to assess these issues? In this chapter, I focus on the last of these questions. In particular, I wish to advance the claim that the academic study of collective memory offers important intellectual help for understanding the biblical representations of Israel's past. (125)

This is a complicated topic and at times Smith stumbles in selecting his terminology, but I believe he is very much on the right track.

1. Collective Memory and Amnesia

Smith begins by setting out two fundamental points about the Bible's treatment of the past.

First, the Bible is not a record of “events” ... “What we have are various witnesses to an event.” (quoting Brevard Childs) ... Second, the Bible is teaching (Torah in Hebrew), much of it religious in character. Ancient Israelites ... as well as modern Biblical scholars, largely recognize the Bible's pedagogical purpose, and this teaching function extends to the Bible's narratives of the past. (126)

Smith refers to “the Bible's treatment of the past” and “the Bible's narratives of the past.” There are several problems with this choice of words, most of which problems Smith later recognizes to varying degrees. While the “Bible” is for us a book, its constituent parts were mostly not written to be part of a book—they were themselves books that were self contained units. The authors and redactors of some, but not all, of the various books that constitute what we call the Bible do in some cases treat of past events--or sometimes of events better described as set in the past. Whether the narratives do in fact describe actual events is quite another matter, as is the question of the original authors' intent. Other books, particularly some of the prophetic books, treat of what, for the prophet, were current or contemporaneous events, although at times also referring to the past. Therefore, while the redactors who formed the collection of writings that we now know as the “Bible” may well have had a view regarding the historicity of the narratives in the Biblical books that treat of events set in the past, that viewpoint must be carefully distinguished from the intentions of the actual authors of those books.

Mark Smith: Monotheism and the Structures of Divinity

In Chapter Three of The Memoirs of God, "Biblical Monotheism and the Structures of Divinity," Mark Smith attempts to explain the development of monotheism in Israel, a process which we have touched upon repeatedly in this examination of Israelite religion. As Smith observes in his introductory remarks, a major difficulty in dealing with this aspect of Israelite religion is that "monotheism was a development in Israelite religion that was read back into its earlier religious tradition." Briefly, monotheism developed within an elite segment of the Israelite population during the late monarchy. However, from the perspective of these relatively late thinkers, monotheism was read back into earlier times, although the writings of the Israelite scriptures clearly preserve important information that shows that earlier Israelite religion was not monotheistic. As a result, the Israelite scriptures must be approached with caution in order to separate out genuine early traditions from later interpretative developments based on Judaic monotheism. Later Christians unfortunately adopted late Jewish interpretations of the early traditions uncritically, as well as reading Christian meanings back into the Israelite scriptures. Smith's approach to this issue views the development of monotheism as part of a "survival strategy" for Israel, one intended as a response to historical challenges to Israel's continued survival--in particular, the fall of the dual kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

Mark Smith: Challenges To Israel During The Biblical

Challenges To Israel During The Biblical Period

Pre-Monarchic Challenges

We have seen that the early origins of Israel were the result of a basically peaceful development, involving a migration of farming populations from relatively nearby regions to the lightly populated highlands of Canaan. The infusion of tribal elements from the south (Midian) with their strong influence on religion and certain social structures was complementary to the "anti-feudal" attitudes of the indigenous population, and gave rise to a distinct Israelite identity. This distinct Israelite social, as opposed to political, identity was recognized as early as the victory Stela of Pharaoh Merneptah in 1208 B.C. The Egyptian inscription makes a careful distinction between the states or political entities that the Pharaoh defeated and Israel, which is categorized as a "people": a social reality but not one that was organized as a state or political entity.

As time went on and the population increased, two areas of conflict emerged for Israelite society, both of which are described in Judges: on the one hand intertribal tensions and feuds between Israelite and allied groupings, and conflicts with both more advanced coastal societies (primarily Philistines) as well as tribal groupings from the desert fringes (Midianites, Arab tribes, Amalekites, etc.) who combined trading and caravaneering with raiding. The informal tribal levy, the traditional response to such problems, is portrayed as effective in the case of intra-Israelite disputes, but we may well believe that as Israel became a more cohesive social reality the need was felt for a formalized authority to control the more destructive aspects of intertribal disputes. The informal response of the tribal levy proved clearly ineffective against external threats of a more organized character, particularly that of the Philistines. The Philistine threat was probably the most significant factor that led to the limited kingship of Saul--limited in that it was largely confined to the more advanced Josephite tribal groupings of the central highlands and Transjordan. Judah and the Galilean regions do not appear to have been part of Saul's kingdom. However, with Saul's death in battle against the Philistines the weaknesses of Saul's kingship were clear: it was still based in tribal loyalties and lacked the cohesive organization of a true state that was needed to withstand external threats of the type that Israel faced. (MG 46-50)


The Challenges of the United Monarchy

The Israelite response to this challenge came in two stages. First, a charismatic warlord, David, arose in the sparsely populated and rugged hill country of Judah, centered around Hebron. David gained valuable experience both in Saul's army as well as in the service of the Philistine city state of Gath, and he parleyed this experience into an independent military power base.

Mark Smith: History and the Israelite Scriptures

We are now at a point from which we can attempt a synthesis of these disparate reflections on the Religion of Israel. I will do so by working through Mark S. Smith's The Memoirs of God (MG) over as many as four separate posts. I have argued that the essence of what Christianity has termed 'revelation' in the pre-Christian past is the development of Israelite religion toward a true monotheism centered on God whose identity--in so far as it is knowable to human reason--is that of creator. From that standpoint Peter Machinist's comments regarding Smith's book are suggestive:

[Smith's book] is not simply a study of the history and religion of ancient Israel nor of [its literature], but of the complicated interface between [Israel's history and religion]--of how the Bible chose to remember the history and religion of the Israel that gave it birth. As Smith compellingly argues, the formation of memory is indeed the central characteristic of the Biblical text, and in a wide-ranging provocative discussion, he allows us to see the multiple ways in which the Biblical authors struggled to make sense of their past and to define its ongoing significance for them.

Obviously, Machinist's language is somewhat anachronistic, in that the vehicle of revelation--seen as the development of Israelite religion to the point that God's own self revelation in Jesus becomes a meaningful event--is a people, not simply a book. Nevertheless, from the Christian standpoint this development (of Israelite religion) is of interest not merely in itself, as a record of historical memory, but for what this development led to. It is this development and its culmination in Jesus that gives it "ongoing significance," enduring and universal significance.