The Religion of Violence

Kim Fabricus, in a typically bombastic post suggests the following bon mot to respond to an antagonistic atheist:

—Religion is inherently violent.
—You mean violence is inherently religious.

Which is a very interesting way of putting it.  Acts of violence do appeal to some essential understanding of the universe, whether it is the will to power, the right of self defence, or the reasonable response to unreasonable provocation, that holds some other thing more valuable than the command to love your enemy.  It is a decision, even if just for one special instance and under irrisistible pressure, to disobey Christ and serve another god entirely.  The iconoclasm of disfiguring a bearer of the image of God with violence is thus at once a moment of sacrilege and of idolatry.

Lev 24:10-23, Blasphemy, the Lex Talionis and the Imago Dei

So there I am, minding my own business, reading through Leviticus with my lady wife one evening, when suddenly I realise, with great anger, that the person responsible for paragraphing my Bible (in this instance an ESV) has started a new paragraph complete with section heading in the middle of a narrative unit.  What a wally.  But then again, you could understand why someone might think v17 starts a new subject on account of the fact it moves from the topic of blasphemy to lex talionis (the law of retaliation).  The section starts in verse 10 with the introduction of a new character:

 pic from here

That is him in the middle, the offspring of a Danite woman and an Egyptian man.  It seems like he was visiting his mum (maybe he had had a row with dad?) and then, perhaps because someone made an unkind remark about his parentage, and then got into a fight and whilst he was fighting blasphemed (v11).  So the Israelites, who until that point had been enjoying watching a good fight, put him in custody until Moses could tell them what God wanted them to do (v12).  So far so good, the Lord then speaks to Moses explaining the method for dealing with blasphemers and also pointing out that the same rule applied to both aliens and citizens, one rule for all (v13-17).  But then God seems to go off on a tangent,

'If anyone takes the life of a human being, he must be put to death. Anyone who takes the life of someone's animal must make restitution—life for life. If anyone injures his neighbour, whatever he has done must be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. As he has injured the other, so he is to be injured. Whoever kills an animal must make restitution, but whoever kills a man must be put to death. You are to have the same law for the alien and the native-born. I am the LORD your God.'  Lev 24:17-22

Which you might think started a new subject, except for the fact it cannot, because the story that started with the introduction of the half-Israelite half-Eygyptian blasphemer is yet to finish, and does in fact finish in the next verse, where his story ends with his violent death (v23).  So what is the connection between blasphemy and the lex talionis, so that the author would place the two together like that?  (if indeed they needed to "placed" together in the first place)

What occurred to me as I pondered this was whether or not this might relate to Gen 9:6, where we have another lex talionis (kind of), that "whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person's blood be shed; for in his own image God made humankind." (NRSV)  Isn't the justification for this lex talionis that murder equates in someway to blasphemy against the image of God in one's fellow human?  In which case the link between blasphemy and murder has already been made.  In Lev 24:10-23, that link is simply made in another direction, possibly predicated on Gen 9:6.  The punishment for blasphemy is death, and murder is itself a form of blasphemy, so it is simple move to go from talking about blasphemy (of the name) to murder (of the image bearer).  However the law is careful to differentiate between the life of an animal and the life of a human, because the animal does not bear the image (v18, 21; animal rights activists take note!).  On the other hand it is equally careful to remove differentiation between citizen and alien in this matter, all human life is equally sacred, it is not dependent on nationality (v16, 22). 


Ok, so here are some questions:
1) How come all the conservative Christians that want the death penalty for murder don't campaign equally vigorously for the death penalty for blasphemy?
2) Those of you who don't support the death penalty for murder, what does that say about your valuing of the human life that was taken?
3) Matt 5:38-42 anyone?

Gen 1:27 and the Gendering of God

You hear people saying all sorts of stupid things about the Bible and if I blogged each one I would never stop blogging.  However a particularly choice example was the time I was told, with great enthusiasm, that Gen 1:27 tells us that God is both male and female, because God created male and female in his image.  (wait for it, that wasn't the most stupid bit) Because God is both male and female, but humans in his/her image are only male or female, when a man and woman have sex they bring those two aspects of God together and so when we have sex it is the closest we come to bearing the complete image of God!  I might forgive the person who said that, because they were single and so had no first hand experience that might dissuade them that coitus resulted in such a elevated state.  No I blame the supposed Bible teacher who told her that. 

Male and female fairy wrens, from here

The verse reads:

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

The point of course, is that God created them in his own image and he also created them male and female.  The point is not that male and female make up different aspects of God's image, but that BOTH male and female bear God's image equally.

In fact the male and female is not what makes us "in God's image" at all, but in actual fact gives us something in common with the animals.  Hence the Hebrew, zachar unekevah (זָכָר וְּנְקֵבָה), are the same words that you would use to refer to male and female animals.  And this is why, for Christians, sex, although a good gift from God, has nothing to do with being more or less close to God because eternal life does not involve marriage or procreation (Mark 12:25).  Being male and female is a consequence of the need to go forth and multiply, not of being made in God's image.  Consequently those who are single/celibate are no less bearers of the image of God than those who are married.  Finally it needs to be pointed out that if God were both male an female he would be an hermaphrodite.  No offence to hermaphrodites, but God has no body so for him/her to have any sexual organs, let alone both sets, is not possible.  God only gets called "him" or "her" because English has no gender neutral personal pronoun, which is pretty inconvenient, just ask an hermaphrodite.

Paul, Philo, Adam and the Imago Dei

Earlier I commented that it is a puzzle why Paul never seems to draw on Gen 1:1-2:4.  The answer may be found in Philo, a Hellenistic Jew and important contemporary of Paul.  In an excellent HTR article* Horsley makes the case that in Philo we can see a type of status disctinctions based around the wise/perfect/good people and those who are foolish/bad/evil, with a third category, the infant, in the middle being pulled in both directions. It is, he argues, these status distinctions that Paul is attempting to combat in 1 Corinthians.  Horsley makes a convincing case that this then informs our understanding of the pneumatikos-psychikos terminology in 1 Cor 2 and 15.  However what is really interesting is how Philo, and Horsley argues that this is not his innovation but representative of a Hellenistic Jewish stream, sees in Genesis 1 and 2 two different types of human being.  The heavenly who are stamped with the image of God (Gen 1) and the earthly who are made out of clay (Gen 2).**  For Philo bearing the Imago Dei was a feature of a spiritual elite, a group of special status, compared to the rest of humanity who were merely made of clay (Adam).  Perhaps this is one reason why Paul stays clear of Genesis 1, because in his context it was used not to argue for the inherent worth of all humanity but to argue for the priviledged status of a select few.  Instead he focuses on Adam as the ancestor of all humanity, who thus need redemption, and on Christ as the true image of God.  For Paul, then, one can only claim to bear the image of God as far as one can claim to bear the image of Christ.

* R.A. Horsley, “Pneumatikos vs Psychikos: Distinctions of Spiritual Status among the Corinthians,”  Harvard Theological Review, 69, 1976, p269-288.
** Philo, Legum Allegoriae, 1:31

The Image of God

Translated from the Spanish of Francisco de Aldana by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Let me know what you think :-)

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O Lord! who seest, from yon starry height,
Centred in one the future and the past,
Fashioned in thine own image, see how fast,
The world obscures in me what once was bright!

Eternal Sun! the warmth which though hast given,
To cheer life's flowery April, fast decays;
Yet in the hoary winter of my days,
For ever green shall be my trust in Heaven.

Celestial King! O let thy presence pass
Before my spirit, and an image fair
Shall meet that look of mercy from on high,
As the reflected image in a glass
Doth meet the look of him who seeks it there,
And owes its being to the gazer's eye.