The Evangelical wing of the Anglican Church has to cease from its desperate grasping of poorly understood English translation of Scripture. It is a bit frightening to leave what one might think are secure moorings, but the fruit of those moorings: the suppression of women, the persecution of sexual minorities, and the destruction of other cultures and tradition, is the result of brackish water in the well. One cannot get bitter water from a sweet well.
I decided to reply to the thesis that God is separate from creation. I have shied away from theology because I think it so hard to come to conclusions. There is a risk that one’s readers will accept the conclusion without doing the hard homework.
I looked for separate in my translation work and found 45 uses of the stem in Hebrew. It has three uses: 17 as the animal, mule. Once as the word kernel, and the rest as our expected idea of separateness, the rivers of Eden, the islands of the nations, Abraham and Lot, the two nations in Rebekah’s womb, Elijah’s separation from Elisha, the bones of the subject of Psalm 22, and so on.
It’s a great read, the word פרד. Proverbs warns us against the degeneration of our words:
One who is wayward dispenses dissension,The unique usage as kernel is in Joel. There is no grain, the kernel is rancid.
and one who natters separates a thousand.
Never is God mentioned as separate from creation. We are not to separate ourselves from others with abstract words.
How can I have a theological conclusion where there appears to be no support for it in Scripture? (If theology is indeed drawn out (abstrahere) from Scripture.) Admittedly I have not looked at the NT. But there I have just read of Holy Spirit in Matthew 1. I know, wrong season! But as Rohr suggests with his tweet, The seeds of Easter are already found in Christmas. Probably better to say that Easter determines that there was a holy seed.
Holy Spirit with or without caps, occurs as a phrase in Hebrew only once – in Psalm 51, but it is prevalent in the NT. There is where ‘separation’ lies. God is Holy. The Holy that protects Mary is the inner sanctum of God, the dwelling place of God with humanity, the whole thrust from wilderness tabernacle to the temple of the body. This is as far from separateness as one can get. God in us in our body.
It seems to me that the God who created Leviathan to sport with refuses separation from humanity and by implication from creation and the whole created order. I haven’t got an abstract name for this since there is no such abstraction in the Scriptures.
What is Scriptural for us who are in Christ is contained in 2 words from Jesus, “Follow me”. That is the shortest requirement for praxis. Even shorter than “Jesus is Lord”, an ambiguity completely lost on English Christians because of the problem with the sense of that very difficult word ‘lord’.
We are being called out of all our idolatry.
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