Francisco Collantes, “Visión de Ezequiel: la resurrección de la carne”
[NT] Wright has drawn attention to the way that Genesis sets Abram up as a new Adam and Israel as a new humanity in him. He uses three lines of evidence. First of all, there is the idea of blessing. This is present in the creation of humanity (Gen 1:28) and is very prominent in the promises to the patriarchs…. Second, there is a strong emphasis on reproductive fruitfulness in the creation story (Gen 1:28) and in the promises to the patriarchs…. Third, the command to humanity to have dominion over creation (Gen 1:28) is transformed into a promise that Abraham’s descendants would possess the gates of their enemies (Gen 22:17). … Not only is Abraham a new Adam and Israel a new humanity, but the promised land of Canaan is a new Eden. … God walks “to and fro” both in Eden (Gen 3:8) and in the sanctuary (Lev 26:12; Deut 23:15); cherubim guard the tree of life both in Eden (Gen 3:24) and the holy of holies in the sanctuary … both Eden and the Sanctuary are entered from the east (Gen 3:24); the menorah in the tabernacle is probably a stylized tree of life, like the tree in Eden; Solomon decorated his temple with botanical and arboreal imagery, giving it a garden-like appearance (1 Kings 6-7); as Adam, the first priest, was to “till and keep” the garden (Gen 2:5), so the Levites are to “till and keep” the sanctuary … just as a river flowed from Eden, so Israel’s visionaries saw a river flowing from the Jerusalem temple (Ps 46:5; Ezekiel 47); gold and precious stones were connected with Eden and the sanctuary…. [I]t is not merely the temple that parallels Eden, but the whole land of Canaan, which, in the symbolism of holy space, shares in the holiness of the temple at its heart. This is seen in part in the Edenic brush strokes with which the descriptions of Canaan are lavishly painted…. It comes out more clearly in the way judgment on Israel’s land is depicted in terms of the destruction of Eden (Joel 2:3) and post-exilic restoration is portrayed as a return to Eden…. Ezekiel … speaks of the restoration of Israel in terms clearly reminiscent of the creation of Adam. The lifeless bodies in the valley are animated by the breath of life from God (Ezekiel 37; Gen 2:7). This army of Adams then returns to a restored land like Eden (36:35) in which the Sanctuary is restored and from which the life-giving river flows into the desert garden (40-48). … Just as Israel is created outside the land and brought in by Yahweh, so Adam is created outside Eden and placed in it by Yahweh (Gen 2:8). As Israel is to fill the land subdue their enemies, so Adam is told to fill the earth and subdue the animals (Gen 1:28). As obedient Israel will enjoy abundant blessing, so too will obedient Adam. … As Israel disobeys and incurs divine oracles of judgment and curse from the prophets, so Adam disobeys and brings a divine oracle of judgment and curse from the Lord (Gen 3:14-19). As Israel is expelled from the Promised Land for not keeping torah, so Adam is expelled from Eden for not keeping the command of Yahweh. … Humanity, in Adam, lost the blessing; but Israel, in Abraham, is the vehicle through which God restores it.
Churches … include narrower and narrower bands of people. When I was a kid in a town of a few hundred, the town doctor, the farmers, the factory workers, and the grocer all came to my father’s church. They didn’t have much choice. It meant that the doctor knew when the widow’s kids were sick and didn’t worry much about her paying him. And when the doctor’s wife was sick, the widow sent dinner over. … Today people will drive miles to find a church made up of people like them. Churches have become collections of affinity groups, of people of the same class and interests, with few roles to assign other than passing the collection plate. How then can church give us a meaningful role, a sense of purpose, an ethic? How then do we reflect light out to the world?
John Alexander, Being Church: Reflections on How to Live as the People of God
St Paul would be wretched before the throne of God, if he thought there was one man beyond the pale of his mercy, and that as much for God’s glory as for the man’s sake. And what shall we say of the man Christ Jesus? Who, that loves his brother, would not, upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far-off time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the blessed, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself more blessed in the pains of hell, than in the glories of heaven? Who, in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one of his kind, one miserable brother in the old-world-time when men were taught to love their neighbour as themselves, was howling unheeded far below in the vaults of the creation, who, I say, would not feel that he must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird his loins, and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire, travelling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his brother?—who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love of the Father?
When we peruse the analysis [David Friedrich Strauss] gives of the different Gospel narratives, we cannot but wonder at the exceeding patience and ingenuity which must have presided over their formation. Let us take, by way of illustration, the first that occurs in his book—the annunciation and birth of the Baptist. According to Strauss, this was got up in the following way. An individual had in his mind a compound image blended from scattered traits respecting the late birth of distinguished individuals as recorded in the Old Testament. He thought of Isaac, whose parents were advanced in their days when they were promised a son, and this suggested that John’s parents should be the same. He remembered how doubtingly Abraham asked, when God promised him a seed which should inherit Canaan, “How shall I know that I shall inherit it?” and hence he made Z[a]charias ask, “Whereby shall I know this?”—he called to mind that the name of Aaron’s wife was, according to the LXX., Elizabeth, and this suggested a name for John’s mother. Then he bethought him of Samson’s birth being announced by an angel, and accordingly he provided an angel to announce that of John also—he glanced at popular Jewish notions regarding angels visiting the priests in the temple, and thence obtained a locality for the angelic apparition to Zacharias—he got back next to Samson, and from his history supplied the instructions which the angel gives respecting John’s Nazaritic education, as well as the blessings which it was predicted that John’s birth would confer upon his country—he next went to the history of Samuel, and borrowed thence the idea of the lyric effusion uttered by Zacharias on the occasion of his son’s circumcision—he then fixed upon a significant name for the prophet, calling him John, after the precedent of Israel and Isaac—the command to Isaiah to write the name of his son, Mahershalal-hash-baz, upon a tablet, recalled to him the necessity of providing Zacharias also with something of the same sort; and as for the dumbness of the priest, it was suggested by the fact that the Hebrews believed that when any man saw a divine vision, he usually lost for a time one of his senses. “So,” exclaims Dr. Strauss, after a long enumeration of all these particulars, “we stand here upon purely mythical-poetical ground!” Indeed! then must the people of that mythical-poetical age have been deeply versed in all those artifices of composition, by which in these later times men of defective powers of fancy continue to construct stories by picking and stealing odds and ends of adventure from those who have written before them. No hero of the scissors-and-paste school ever went more unscrupulously to work than did this unknown composer of the story of John’s birth. And, after all, he made it look so natural and so apparently, original, that it required a German philosopher of the nineteenth century to find out for the first time, that it was a mere piece of Mosaic from bits of the antique—a “mere thing of shreds and patches!” I blush for the degeneracy of the age. The most practised of booksellers’ hacks now-a-days is far, very far behind this skillful literary man of a mythical-poetical age.
Such are some of the logical inconsistencies into which Dr. Strauss is betrayed by his theory. I adduce them not as against him, but as against it. They are not the slips of a careless or inconsistent reasoner; they are the errors into which a man of much acuteness and dexterity has been led by having a false theory to defend.
William Lindsay Alexander, Christ and Christianity: A Vindication of the Divine Authority of the Christian Religion, Grounded on the Historical Verity of the Life of Christ
When I came first to the University I was as nearly without a moral conscience as a boy could be. Some faint distaste for cruelty and for meanness about money was my utmost reach—of chastity, truthfulness, and self-sacrifice I thought as a baboon thinks of classical music. By the mercy of God I fell among a set of young men (none of them, by the way, Christians) who were sufficiently close to me in intellect and imagination to secure immediate intimacy, but who knew, and tried to obey, the moral law. Thus their judgement of good and evil was very different from mine. Now what happens in such a case is not in the least like being asked to treat as ‘white’ what was hitherto called black. The new moral judgements never enter the mind as mere reversals (though they do reverse them) of previous judgements but ‘as lords that are certainly expected’. You can have no doubt in which direction you are moving: they are more like good than the little shreds of good you already had, but are, in a sense, continuous with them. … It is in the light of such experiences that we must consider the goodness of God. Beyond all doubt, His idea of ‘goodness’ differs from ours; but you need have no fear that, as you approach it, you will be asked simply to reverse your moral standards. When the relevant difference between the Divine ethics and your own appears to you, you will not, in fact, be in any doubt that the change demanded of you is in the direction you already call ‘better’. The Divine ‘goodness’ differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.
When I was twenty the one true free spirit I had heard of was Shelley, Shelley, who wrote tracts advocating atheism, free love, the emancipation of women, the abolition of wealth and class, and poems on the bliss of romantic love, Shelley, who, I learned later, perhaps almost too late, remarried Harriet, then pregnant with their second child, and a few months later ran off with Mary, already pregnant herself, bringing with them Mary’s stepsister Claire, who very likely also became his lover,
and in this malaise à trois, which Shelley had imagined would be “a paradise of exiles,” they lived, along with the spectre of Harriet, who drowned herself in the Serpentine, and of Mary’s half sister Fanny, who killed herself, maybe for unrequited love of Shelley, and with the spirits of adored but often neglected children conceived incidentally in the pursuit of Eros—Harriet’s Ianthe and Charles, denied to Shelley and consigned to foster parents; Mary’s Clara, dead at one; her Willmouse, Shelley’s favorite, dead at three; Elena, the baby in Naples, almost surely Shelley’s own, whom he “adopted” and then left behind, dead at one and a half; Allegra, Claire’s daughter by Byron, whom Byron sent off to the convent at Bagnacavallo at four, dead at five—
and in those days, before I knew any of this, I thought I followed Shelley, who thought he was following radiant desire.
“Oh cruel, cruel!” I wailed. “Is it nothing to you that you leave me here alone? Psyche; did you ever love me at all?”
“Love you? Why, Maia, what have I ever had to love save you and our grandfather the Fox?” (But I did not want her to bring even the Fox in now.) “But, Sister, you will follow me soon. You don’t think any mortal life seems a long thing to me tonight? And how would it be better if I had lived? I suppose I should have been given to some king in the end—perhaps such another as our father. … Indeed, indeed, Orual, I am not sure that this which I go to is not the best.”
“This!”
“Yes. What had I to look for if I lived? Is the world—this palace, this father—so much to lose? We have already had what would have been the best of our time. I must tell you something, Orual, which I never told to anyone, not even you.”
I know now that this must be so even between the lovingest hearts. But her saying it that night was like stabbing me.
“What is it?” said I, looking down at her lap where our four hands were joined.
“This,” she said, “I have always—at least, ever since I can remember—had a kind of longing for death.”
“Ah, Psyche,” I said, “have I made you so little happy as that?”
“No, no, no,” she said. “You don’t understand. Not that kind of longing. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine…where you couldn’t see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking across at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn’t (not yet) come and I didn’t know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.”
She kissed both my hands, flung them free, and stood up. She had her father’s trick of walking to and fro when she talked of something that moved her. And from now till the end I felt (and this horribly) that I was losing her already, that the sacrifice tomorrow would only finish something that had already begun. She was (how long had she been, and I not to know?) out of my reach, in some place of her own.
For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. … But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life. They are poor, yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonoured, and yet in their very dishonour are glorified. They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and bless; they are insulted, and repay the insult with honour; they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by the Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred.
“Nay, lady, I am the last of the Númenóreans and the latest King of the Elder Days; and to me has been given not only a span thrice that of Men of Middle-earth, but also the grace to go at my will, and give back the gift. Now, therefore, I will sleep.
“I speak no comfort to you, for there is no comfort for such pain within the circles of the world. The uttermost choice is before you: to repent and go to the Havens and bear away into the West the memory of our days together that shall there be evergreen but never more than memory; or else to abide the Doom of Men.”
“Nay, dear lord,” she said, “that choice is long over. There is now no ship that would bear me hence, and I must indeed abide the Doom of Men, whether I will or I nill: the loss and the silence. But I say to you, King of the Númenóreans, not till now have I understood the tale of your people and their fall. As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Eldar say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive.”
“So it seems,” he said. “But let us not be overthrown at the final test, who of old renounced the Shadow and the Ring. In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!”
Brave Ole World 