Tag Archives: Christian Theologizing

Wilderness Abel and Canaanite Cain

The Genesis story about Cain and Abel has often been interpreted as a story about sibling jealousy and questionable parenting, but the actual biblical text is about the conflict of two modes of relating to Reality—Reality with a capital “R”—that absolutely Mysterious All-Powerfulness that meets us in every event of our lives.

Every Abel and every Cain is closer to this Mysterious Reality than to his or her own breathing. The truth that Reality is infinitely beyond us does not change the truth that Reality is also infinitely close to us. This is true for women as well men. Abel and Cain are two different relationships with Reality for any he or she.

Abel’s mode of worship is a symbol of that obedience to the Moses style of realism that was carved out in 40 years of wilderness practices. After this Moses-trained, One-Reality-loving community of people conquered a place for themselves in that more fertile land of promise, a deep religions conflict took place between the Moses monotheism and the Canaanite diversity of devotions that celebrated the many different powers of being human.

In this story, Cain’s mode of worship was a devotion to these many aspects of human life. His many gods and goddesses represent different aspects of our humanity. These were and still are real powers in our lives, worthy of some access and care, but no one of these devotions, nor all of them together, is a devotion to that One Reality that creates and destroys all aspects of our humanity. So the Canaanite relationship with that One Reality was a flight from that One Reality into a devotion to the various aspects of being human. This put Canaanite humanism in severe conflict with a devotion to that One Truth of that One Awesome Reality of Moses.

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Washed of Your Era

It was in those days that Jesus arrived from the Galilean village of Nazareth and was baptized by John in the Jordan. All at once, as he came up out of the water, he saw the heavens split open, and the Spirit coming down upon him like a dove. A voice came out of Heaven, saying, “You are my dearly-beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased!  Mark 1:9-11

Faced with such writings almost 2000 years old, biblical interpretation today requires a bit more work than simply reading the stories. It is important to know that most of these biblical stories are not scientific history, but it is needful to do a bit of scientific history to find what these stories meant to their authors. But such history is only the beginning. Here are my four steps for interpreting a passage of biblical writing.

1. Scientific History: What do we know about when and where this text was written, who wrote it, and what probable meanings were being given to the specific words used by this time-bound story teller?
2. Literary Analysis: Was this a poem, a teaching, a fictional story, a historical legend, a theological myth, etc.?
3. Metaphorical Translation: Interpreting any transcendent, two-layer, story-talk with our contemporary, existential, one-layer, transparency language.
4. “Word-of-God” Suggestions: What might this passage be saying to us today about the living of our authentic lives and about the power of these Christian symbols for our own depth living?

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My Contemporary Theologizing

Perhaps I owe the readers of these e-mails (which are also Realistic Living blog posts) some information on who I am as a Christian theologizer. I am certainly not a great scholastic— a theologian in the company of Rudolf Bultmann, whom I consider to be the most important Christian biblical scholar and theologian of the last two centuries. I also include Paul Tillich, H. Richard Niebuhr, and Dietrich Bonhoefer in my smallest circle of great recent Christian theologians. All four of these scholarly luminaries lean strongly toward what Tillich calls the “Protestant principle”—by which he means the perpetual critique of all religious and cultural assertions. These four theologians are also “catholic” thinkers in the sense of fully honoring the whole history of Christian expression. I am especially indebted to Paul Tillich and H. R. Niebuhr for my love of history and my perspective on church history.

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