We Who Wrestle with God

1

In the Beginning

1.1. God as creative spirit

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Genesis 1:1-2

How is God presented as the great book of Genesis begins? As an animated spirit-creative, mobile, and active-something that does, and is. God is, in short, a character whose personality reveals itself as the biblical story proceeds.

Genesis opens with a confrontation. God is "moving" upon the face of the "waters." What does moving mean? It means God is mobile, obviously. Less obviously, moving is what we say when we have been struck by something deep. God is what has encountered us when new possibilities emerge and take shape. God is what we encounter when we are moved to the depths. What, then, does waters mean-particularly the waters that God has not yet created? That is the ancient Hebrew tehom or tohu va bohu: chaos; potential; what lurks but has not yet been revealed-as water is the precondition for life-but also harbors the unknown in its depths. God is therefore the spirit who faces chaos; who confronts the void, the deep; who voluntarily shapes what has not yet been realized, and navigates the ever-transforming horizon of the future. God is the spirit who engenders the opposites (light/darkness; earth/water), as well as the possibilities that emerge from the space between them:

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1:6-10

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

Genesis 1:14-15

How might we, in human terms, understand this first encounter with God? What is He, and what is He confronting? Imagine, for a moment, what you face when you awaken in the morning. Your attention does not seize on the objects that surround you-on the banal reality of your bedroom furniture. Instead, you ruminate on the challenges and opportunities of the day. Perhaps you feel anxious, because there are simply too many things to deal with. Maybe (hopefully) you are in a better situation, and you look forward, instead, to the opportunities that present themselves. Your consciousness-your being-hovers over the potential offered to you by the new beginning of the morning in a manner akin to the conditions and process of creation itself, as portrayed in the opening verses of the Bible-a creation that continues with every glance you take and every word you utter. Through consciousness we process the domain of possible being-of becoming. That is the realm that inspires both hope, in our apprehension of positive things ahead, and anxiety, in the face of life's dreadful uncertainty.

Here is another way of understanding our confrontation with possibility. Imagine any object. Now imagine that there is a space surrounding that object consisting of what that object could become as time progresses and context shifts. Under normal conditions, the most likely future state of any familiar object-a bottle, a pen, the sun-can be predicted by its current state. With a vicious twist of fate, however, or a radical shift of aim, such constraints can be lifted, and the object's unrevealed possibility made apparent. A bottle in a raucous bar can become a deadly club or, smashed in anger, a spear with the edges of a razor. A pen can become the mechanism of life itself when inserted into the trachea of someone choking. The sun can become not the stable and predictable giver of life and light that defines the days and nights we inhabit but the source of the solar storm that brings down the electrical grid on which we so fragilely depend.

It is that breadth of possibility that consciousness confronts and processes when it apprehends the world and determines to act on it. Our movement forward in time is therefore no mechanical procession through a realm of stable actuality. Consciousness deals with what could yet realize itself in exactly the way the spirit of God deals with the void and formless deep; in the way the divine contends with the massa confusa that is chaos and opportunity and the matrix from which all forms emerge.

God is equally that which (or who) creates not only order but, as is stressed repeatedly throughout the opening book of the biblical corpus, the order that is good. On the first day, he establishes the separation between light and darkness (Genesis 1:3-4). On the second, he creates the dome of heaven, separating the lower waters, the terrestrial, and the upper waters, the source of rain (Genesis 1:6-8). On the third, the terra firma we inhabit is gathered together and separated from what then becomes the oceans, and plants appear on the ground (Genesis 1: 9-13). On the fourth day,

God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,

And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1:16-18

On the fifth day, the fish and birds appear (Genesis 1:20-23). All this creation, despite its pristine quality or goodness, is still striving upward, developing further, as indicated on the sixth and last day of God's calling forth of the world. The animals make their appearance (Genesis 1:24-25), and finally, man and woman:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Genesis 1:26-28

In this finale of Creation, God seems to have extended Himself beyond anything He managed previously. He renders the following judgment: "And God saw every thing that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). What does this mean? It means, in the first place, that God not only confronts and shapes chaos and possibility but does so with benevolent intent and positive outcome. God is presented as the process or spirit guided by the aim of having all things exist and flourish; the spirit guided by love, in a word. This sequence of creation means, in the second place, not only that life should and will manifest itself more abundantly but also that it will do so in the constant upward spiral-from good to very good-that might serve as the definition of heaven itself. That is Jacob's Ladder, the process that is eternally making everything as it should be but is somehow also improving, finding new pathways to higher orders of the true, the beautiful, and the good.

Creation culminates in the making of man and woman, and it is their creation specifically that is deemed "very good." The first two human beings, and men and women in general, are thus avatars of God Himself, with God as the creative spirit that calls order into being from chaos and possibility, and man and woman as a microcosm of that spirit, similar or even identical in essence, charged with forever reiterating the creative process. A more optimistic conception of humanity could hardly be imagined. Nor could the importance of God's insistence be greater. This description of creative process-portrayal of the action of the Word, oriented to the good-is also a statement of first principles: the very principles that man and woman are immediately called upon to submit to and uphold. The biblical account ascribes to each of us a value that places us at the very pinnacle of creation; a value that is very good in a cosmos that is good; a value that supersedes all earthly evaluation (given our reflection of the image of the divine itself). This, it must be understood, is a matter of definition. The stake in the ground around which everything else must rotate is established upon humanity's divine reflection, and it is to be held as immoveable, sacrosanct, inviolable: sacred. This is nothing less than the description of the moral order implicit in the cosmos itself, reflective of the nature of God, man and woman, and the foundation on which the idea of intrinsic rights and sovereign responsibility is based.

Do we believe this story? Do we believe what it states and implies? First: What does it mean to believe? We certainly act, individually and collectively, as if it were true, at least when we are behaving as we should-at least when we are acting in the genuinely best interests of ourselves and everyone else. We treat the people we love (and even the people we hate) as if they are indefinitely valuable loci of creative consciousness, capable of finding their way forward and creating the world that is dependent on their finding. It is the fact of this supreme identity and being that forever impedes the power-mad striving of every organization, society, or state that dares threaten individual sovereignty. The wise and the unwise alike would do well to thank the Lord for that.

We object, deeply offended, if anyone fails to treat us as befits a child of God-that is, if anyone fails to treat us as if we truly matter. We likewise offend if we treat others as if they are beneath us; as if they are anything less than the conscious beings of sacred worth upon whose experience reality itself somehow mysteriously depends. Even if the story that we tell ourselves in this increasingly atheist, materialist, and no fact-based world exists in skeptical contradistinction to that belief, we still believe, insofar as we act out such offense, whether given or taken. No man who avows disbelief in free will or even in consciousness itself dares to treat his wife as if she lacks free will or consciousness. Why not? Because all hell breaks loose if he does. And why is that? Because the presumption of intrinsic value reflects a reality that is deep enough-"real" enough-so that we deny it at our practical peril. And, if that presumption is so absolutely necessary, how is it not true? And if the presumption that structures our every interaction is acceptance of or dramatization of the transcendent value of the individual (even ourselves), then in what manner do we not "believe" that value to be real? More profoundly, we may ask: At what point must it be admitted that a "necessary fiction" is true precisely in proportion to its necessity? Is it not the case that what is most deeply necessary to our survival is the very essence of "true"? Any other form of truth runs counter to life, and a truth that does not serve life is a truth only by an ultimately counterproductive standard-and thereby not fundamentally "true."

At this point in the Genesis story, we have been barely introduced to God as character. Nonetheless, these inexhaustibly rich opening lines describe the essential nature of the cosmic order: the existence of a process that transforms chaos and possibility into the habitable order that is good, aiming at very good; the proclamation that this process is both fundamental to and superordinate in that creation; the assertion that reality itself depends on it; the insistence that human beings do and should participate in this process and that the possibility of such participation bestows upon each person divine and ultimate worth and responsibility. Man (and woman, too, so miraculously, right at the beginning) are thus formulated in the very image of the divine. Whatever essence typifies or characterizes every human being-the very spirit that makes them both human and valuable-is directly akin to the force that transforms the void into the Heavenly Garden itself. All of the most functional and desirable places and states of the world, from the microcosm of happy marriage to the integrated community of nation, are predicated both implicitly and explicitly on something much like this presumption. Furthermore, and in a manner that buttresses the central point, the lack of that belief or faith makes the terrible relationships and polities that man can also create the true hell that they far too often become.

Do we believe? When we falter in that commitment, catastrophe looms.

1.2. The spirit of man in the highest place

God says to the men and women of his new creation that they are to "subdue" the earth (notably, after they "replenish" it). This idea has been widely criticized, not least because of its expansion in the next verse, which gives man and woman sovereignty ("dominion") over fish, fowl, and "every living thing." Those who claim something else should be placed in the superordinate position object vociferously to the ethos encapsulated in these words. It is not man and woman in relationship with God that should be elevated, celebrated, and worshipped, according to such critics. Consider the words of history professor Lynn White, taken from his famous essay of 1967, "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis":

Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. As early as the 2nd century both Tertullian and Saint Irenaeus of Lyons were insisting that when God shaped Adam he was foreshadowing the image of the incarnate Christ, the Second Adam. Man shares, in great measure, God's transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia's religions (except, perhaps, Zoroastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends. . . . In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.