I. Introduction
This book lays forth an idiosyncratic, constricting, if not
incoherent, view of the theological and historical significance of temple
architecture and sacrifice for Christian understanding of the incarnation and
atonement of Christ. It extrapolates connections of the Priestly Theologian’s
Tabernacle Narrative to fit Jesus’ ministry as it fuses links from non-Priestly
sources of theology without submitting these to New Testament validation. To
accomplish imaginative reworking of sources, this book employs faulty
methodology it terms “canonical” but in practice cuts up and rearranges the
canonical Hebrew Bible from an unjustified exegesis that temporally and
spatially links the holy ground on Sinai with the interior of the desert tabernacle.
Once this exegetical move is made, the institutional spaces on the way to and
within the Promised Land “leak” ontology into external purviews, and the
historicity of religious events is conflated by the hermeneutics of
institutional continuance to resequencing by midrash. The result of lurching
eclectically through the events and places of the canonical narratives is a
move that unbridles the immanent with speculative transcendentalizing, removing
the warrant of the Old Testament’s witness of an historical religion to a people
in a covenanted territory instead to make the temple spaces of Jerusalem a
thematic absolute while making the incarnation and processive economy of
Christ’s essence—its messianic teleology of repair--contingent to serving
institutionalizing logic. The attribution of contingency to an enabled
relationship with God is baked into the very title of this book: “That [God]
may dwell among them.” Yet God is always with us, but not always apparently,
which we misinterpret as absence that requires human initiative to clarify. The
relationship of re’iyyah (appearance) to dwelling is recurrently germane to the texts addressed but not rendered explicit by this book’s attempt to systematically relate architectural and
institutionalized mediations of the human-divine relationship: Where human
performance of sacrifice in a precise architectural and ritual construction is
Anderson’s proposed explanation of “means,” “effective” in making ontology
“leak” (viii; see footnote 9, below) into our awareness, thereby “instantiating”
a relationship with God.
Anderson’s rescoping of time and
space flattens how the elements of tent, tabernacle, and temple change as
revelatory media in the OT. A loose-ended reconstruction of these into a
unified narrative of continuance culminates with the messiah’s incarnation and
atonement with a kenotic application. The book’s repeated references to John’s
Prologue mistranslates the verbal form of skēnē of John 1:14 as “tabernacle”
with its implication of a fixed and determinate sanctuary rather than “tent”
open to the environment. By this translation, the book thereby imports
representational homologies of continued form where distinctions of the
imprinted kinematics of Abraham’s faith are intended both protologically and
eschatologically in John’s theology. [Ps. 27: 4-6 distinguishes these
structures. The temple is a place of “looking” for God, while the ʾōhel appears nested inside it,
associated with rock/stone as a protected outcropping where the penitent is now
the one outlooking. V. 11 situates this nested structure as part of a tutelege
function and program. The same word in 2 Samuel 22:3, v. 11 associates the rock
of God with the tent that “leads me” to salvation.
Ps 19:4 reveals an ontology a tent
of enduring righteousness--
[τὸ σκήνωμα
is the LXX rendering of ʾōhel, the
same word applied when the Israelites end their desert wandering phase, as
beginning in Deut 33: 18 and tied to right sacrifices in v. 19]
--tying the mobility of the sun’s radiance. The suns radiance situates
the Transfiguration’s radiance in a simple structure, which Peter identifies
with his proposal to build Moses, Elijah, and the shining Jesus each a skēnē.
This proposal cannot refer to plural tabernacles but aligns Peter’s imaging of
sukkoth from the Festival of Booths. This word has implications for
understanding John’s use of skēnē noted below, as Mark has John
accompanying Peter’s diffident and ignored proposal at the Transfiguration. Moreover, the
condensation of the Festival of Booths imagery with Passover during Jesus’
entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday is implicitly tied by John’s Gospel to the
palm imagery of Ezekiel’s temple and which immediately precedes Jesus’s “cleansing”
of the outer courtyard of Herod’s temple, fulfilling the details of Zechariah
14 (Olds in prep).
From this intertextual reading, it is clear that “tent” and
tabernacle, while at times contextually nested in larger realities, are not
synonyms. The Torah’s miškān is intermediate and tutelary in scope, while the
tent is the transfiguring witness, by both Peter and John tied to something
reforming, a new type of structure. The miškān operates between the Golden Calf
episode and a less centralizing material context in the historical runup to
temple making. The LXX begins to use σκήνωμα as the Golden Calf generation of
Israelites have given way to those preparing to cross the Jordan into the
promised land for illuminating witness. The tabernacle may not be read into the
NT history except in error, as a category mistake.
It is the ʾōhel môʿēd (tent of meeting/testimony,
whereby John 1:14’s skēnē is in a construct situated with v. 19’s martyria) and not
the miškān (a precisely determinate mobile sanctuary) that frames John’s
theology. First, in his gospel prologue and culminating with the heavenly
Jerusalem introduced in Rev. 15:5, the heavenly temple (Jerusalem) is predicated
with a tent of meeting with God in testimonial witness, not a sanctuary
soliciting a recondite divinity. The latter is ever given to institutionalizing
ritual focus that tames this meeting with ideas of transactional contingencies
and appeasements. John’s rendering of temple overlays a tent of
meeting/testimony in concord with Ezekiel’s (40-44) vision.
Anderson’s hodgepodge rereading
of the temple and its sacrificial function “fits” with institutionalizing
religion and sanctuaries. Spectacularly, his misreading of the continuation of
forms comes to situate Mary at the center of the eschatological place (pp.
200-209), applying a medieval Roman Catholic liturgical text as a fulfillment
of architectural systematics. At no point in this book does Anderson suggest an
awareness of his heavenly personalities in narrative apposition to Ezekiel’s
vision of a Palm-centered, new tented temple manifest in Peter’s understanding
of the Transfiguration and in the condensation of symbols of Holy Week and Palm
Sunday in the Gospel of John as guides of earth-bound historical courses.
Anderson’s institutionalization
of eclectic vectors of time and space without a responsible consideration of
the NT results in such a confused systematics of continuation--of stone
architecture and ritual, subordinating the atonement as an existential hiatus
of self-emptying and locked to it. While kenosis is a waypoint of atonement, it
is not its fulfillment. Atonement participates in the reparative teleology of
heart by meritorious expiation of judgment—the atropaic dissolution of sin by
supplication and blood--heart repair in the witness of aligning and committed faith
rather than simply trusting acceptance of the heart’s stoppage. The essence of
the incarnation and atonement “instantiates” this new covenant of the
enlivening heart. A sanctifying covenant de-petrifies the temple and
miraculously transforms it into the metaphysical flesh of, by, and for
intentional grace.
In contrast with Anderson’s
method of finding eternity resonating in the stones (see footnote 9, below), a
more comprehensive than tabernacled understanding of the OT sacrificial theme
in time and space would begin with Jesus’ role and orientations in traveling in
these spaces in a later historical context, reforming the physical
representation of sacrifice and reorienting ritual outward into spiritual
worship and understanding the imprint of sacrifice in prepared witness. Such
reorienting recognition means working backward from NT sources to characterize
how Jesus explicitly recognizes, manifests, and re-presents Old Testament
symbols, figures, and practices, updating their understanding in a way that
seemed to religious institutionalizers a radical, “totally new” (p. 4)
reworking of Israelite righteousness now revealed as destined for all people on
the ground.
Anderson presents a book on the
narrative role of temple sacrifice without sufficient engagement with NT
sources and portrayals of Jesus’ redirection of forms and modes of
meaning-making and relationship with the Trinitarian essence (which is conative
grace! [Olds 2023a]). Anderson’s methodological flaws limit the necessary
broader interpretation of sacrificial worship and neglect how Jesus condenses
Old Testament prophecies and symbols in and by his person into a new fusion of Israel’s
religion as serving God in and by neighbor love.
To the extent that religion is
reduced to an institutionalization in stone, the incarnation is revealed as nonsense
and the atonement as failure. And those revelations may be the negative value
of such a book as this, in my view otherwise destined to become, at best, a
curio in Christian theology subordinated to a history of religion’s approach. While I am hard pressed to find any positive contributions to Christian theology in this work, it did lead me to a deeper exploration of Anderson's cited Biblical sources and to reveal how a history of religion hermeneutic underlying their consideration leads to the institutionalization of boundary keeping.
II. Major Exegetical Faultlines
The procedure in Anderson’s chart and text on p. 154
exemplifies his problems of focus, the seed of his errant report. His chart
incomprehensibly portrays, by lurches in time and space, the rearranging of the
canonical sequence of verses in order to claim parallels between the appearance
at Sinai and the accompaniment of the cloud in the desert trials of the Exodus
generation. Anderson claims that the left and right columns of “the following
chart make clear…reveal[ing]… the tabernacle [In Exod. 40:34-Lev. 1:1]
functions as a moveable Mount Sinai…a traveling Mount Sinai…the portable nature
of this shrine.” His three-fold assertion conditions his presentation of the
centralizing, institutionalizing nature of the miškān where God dwells. The chart
presents *faulty narrative exegesis: the verses are misreported in disrupted
sequence, and the supposed parallel on the charts between Exod. 24: 18 and
Exod. The negation in the latter belies 40:35 in contradistinction with the
former! In the former, Moses was able to enter the cloud on Sinai, while in the
latter, “he is NOT able to enter the tent of the meeting.” The miškān, rather is revealed to function as mobile
testing and tutelary of the people’s witness, the preparation for living
testimony and service and not a Sinaitic dwelling for the people.
Anderson’s reconstruction of the
textual sequence manifests three signature problems with Anderson’s book.
First, it demonstrates that his focus on the precision of God’s architectural
instruction to Moses in the Word is not mirrored or honored in Anderson’s
improvisational text criticism. As Anderson reports in his chapter 6,
improvisation in the tabernacle ritual gets Nadab and Abihu killed.
Second, the thrice-stated
conclusion he draws from his charted exegesis does not follow by reason of his
failure to conform to academic norms of demonstrating parallelism. Thus, the
Tabernacle Narrative Anderson presents proceeds from this radically flawed “ground.”
Third, the liberties Anderson takes with time and space in his featured texts
hermeneutically run afoul of the covenant of a promised place and the unfolding
historical sequencing (timing) of messianic expectation that originates in
Daniel 9 and is the context of the late “Second” Temple and its demise (see below),
bringing an end to an institutionalized vassal-monarch temple.
Of the second problem of the
chart in question, Anderson’s reconstruction evades academic norms “by which
one can determine that a text is probably dependent upon another
text…[specifically] the criterion of ‘density: [that] the more parallels one
can posit between two texts, the stronger the case that they issue from a
literary connection…[as well as t]he criterion of order [that] examines the
relative sequencing of similarities in the two works. If parallels appear in
the same order, the case strengthens for a genetic connection.”
Yet not only are the sequential
orders of narrative presentation of theological locations significantly
different in the texts rearranged by Anderson’s chart, the density of parallels
is vitiated by the negation in Exod. 40:35 lacking a parallel in Exod. 24:18.
The exegetical claim, thrice asserted, that the tabernacle is at the end of the
Book of Exodus functioning as a traveling Sinai where people live inside the same
place with God as Moses is thereby negated. It is concerning that the book’s
editors did not correct this distorting claim.
From this misguiding point,
Anderson launches through the Book of Leviticus and beyond, entirely ignoring
the scapegoat ritual of Lev. 16:20-26; 30 and its origin as an apotropaic
sacrifice for the sin of the people. Moreover, as I will develop below, this
ritual introduces a relevant figure of Christ’s atoning, outside-the-camp
expiation on the Cross. Instead, Anderson repeats his claims that OT sacrifices
were not structured to atone for sin. In this way, he continues building his
systematic theology of institutional architectures as instantiating a
relationship in which God dwells.
Other questionable exegetical
claims involve the Tamid service of the Tabernacle as conditional, “a means by
which God is to be encountered at the sanctuary” (p. 82). Anderson reports a
translation of the verbs of Exod. 25:8 as consecutives imparting a sense of
contingency (his translation of “so that,” pointing to the structure of Exod.
29: 42b-46 for support), making God’s dwelling contingent on the Israelites making
for God a sanctuary. However, this is problematic theology: Making relationship with God contingent on a
human act of building a structure. Such adopts ANE ziggurat theology of
the human-constructed staircase to
heaven, whereby human initiative merits relationship with the divine, rather
than one’s responsiveness to divine calling.
The verbs in these two passages
from Exodus do not support the necessity of reading them in a conditional
sequence, and indeed, the LXX (and NIV) of Exod. 25:8 dispenses with the implication of
contingency other than simply an accompaniment of actions. Indeed, the LXX of
Exod. 25: 8 contextualizes the second verb not as “dwelling” but as “appearing,”
which will have later import in the Tamid service of John the Baptist’s father
Zechariah (Luke 1: 8-9) that Christians should consider as its historical role
in the eponymous Prophet’s framing of the activities surrounding the temple on
Palm Sunday (below).
The verbs of Exod. 25:8 are
indicative, and though an imperatival force may carry over from the paragraph’s
opening (implied by the post-scroll imposition of verse numbering), the LXX’s
indicative syntax is a simple pairing of activities rather than cohortative or
conditional initiated by the first subject.
Indeed the LXX makes explicit, by its rendering of the verbs, the witnessing
function of these structures, not a coordination of agencies.
The LXX renders this verbal
syntax by a correlate pair of inceptives: future imperfects with a connecting
conjunction which conveys an intended meaning as “sharing of expectation” or
volition manifested in aligning images—indeed imaging acts that manifest the
correlative processing of divine (viz. Trinitarian) conation. The identified
verbal sequence is not conditional but a mirror of relationship, a
phenomenology of witnessing where human piety of graciousness takes precedence
over structural grandiosity in imaging divine essence and its attendant
features of contingent warrant for sovereign mediation.
On page 89, Anderson links the
Tamid service in a way that makes the latter part of a conditional as the
English translation reads the imperative in Exod. 29:46; same as he proposed on
p. 82. However, the infinitive of that verse, in both the MT and the LXX,
manifests no usual conditional construct in either original language. Alter (2008)
translates the latter Hebrew infinitive in construct with the preposition as
purposive--God’s initiative rather than any contingency applied to God’s will
from human initiative. As mentioned previously, the imperative fits better as
volitional, fitting in with the promise of the free grace of indwelling. As
presented below, grace becomes less blocked outside of the institutional stone
that radicalizes and stabilizes the closed-off dimension of the miškān, keeping
instead with the Abrahamic context of tenting open and hospitable to the environment.
The Tamid “has nothing to do with atoning for
sins…[and] should be understood as part of the ‘care and feeding’ of the deity
who resides in the tabernacle… ‘feeding the gods’ to open a place for
Israelites to ‘position themselves’…in a subordinate, reverential posture
toward the deity…Sacrifice is effective… because it creates [a] relationship by
instantiating it.” (p. 100; contrast Ps. 50: 12-15; Heb. 9:10a). In this “feeding
of the divine” we return to Anderson’s sacrificial anthropomorphization, as of
Zeus Bomios noted in footnote 9. Again, Anderson locates a conditional
initiative with the sacrifice--the human agent’s piety--to “create
relationship.” Yet:
Psalm 50:7-15: God has no need
of food.
Jer. 7:22 notes that sacrifice
did not originate when Moses led the people out from Egypt. They had then been
directed to obey God’s voice (Exodus 20).
The tabernacle sacrificial system began with the directions to Moses after the
Golden Calf episode and the people’s rebellion.
Isaiah 1:11-17 notes that the theological
initiative of the Israelite lies in the
sacrificial posture and nature of justice (cf. Micah 6:6-8)
Anderson’s claim (p. 82) that
the “so that” of Exod. 25:8 and the infinitive of Exod. 29:46 conveys conditionality of means or
contingency of ends from the perspective of human initiative. Anderson’s
presentation had earlier introduced the concept of the means in the sacrificial
structure at Numbers 3 (p. 55), a discourse that led “some rabbinic texts [to]
understand viewing the furniture as a means of ‘seeing God’” (pp. 66; 75).
Anderson recognizes a “distinguish[ing]” gap in the sacrificial purpose and
role between Leviticus 8 and 9-10 (126), at which point the evaluation of “effectiveness”
enters into the exegetical import of sacrifice. It is not the ritual of service
but the priestly role performances and dedication to temple treasuries that
come to define temple pieties, at least in the critical view of the writers of
the Gospels.
Anderson’s exegesis of Tamid as
a means for indwelling presumes something about the later Davidic impulse for
constructing a temple with tabernacle allusions. Anderson ties these means to
the Ark narrative in the Books of Samuel (pp. 120f): that God’s promise of an
enduring house for David has some conditioned and initiating volition on the
part of David to construct a house for that God, lamentably tying, in some
readings, God’s “house” to the destiny of David’s “house.”
The sacrificial service is part of the redistributive nature
of the sacrificial produce shared with the priests—an application of Lev. 19:19
is for the people to become priests as noted in the Book of Hebrews. Thus the
Tamid service prepares for the performance and operative witness of the Golden
Rule and the reorientation by Jesus of ritual formalism empty of social
concern. Such service also prepares for the priestly expansion at Pentecost
(fulfilling, as part of the new covenant, Jer. 33:22) so that the Tamid is a
realized feature of the burnt offering of priestly piety exemplified by John
the Baptist’s father in Luke 1. It anticipates the new covenanted sacramental
offerings of Pentecost’s witnessing. In this view, the detailed and particular
rigor of the sacrificial infrastructures dictated to Moses was God’s
preparation of a people for Pentecostal witness, a service where God is served which
is then expanded into social charity and care of human precarity. Where ritual
and moral service are aligned per Lev. 19:19, God is served in the structure’s
structuring of awareness, but when the structure becomes the paramount focus
absent the awareness of God’s processing essence, his volative and intentional
grace, the neighbor tends to be neglected and excluded by ritual scrupulosity
and imposition of priestly legal administration (the reverse of Saul and Cyrus’
arrogation noted in footnote 2). The one who lived dedicated to the temple as
if called to duties to its treasury (τὸν κορβανᾶν Matt
27:6; Mark 7:11) and participation in hegemony is reoriented by Jesus to human
needs (Matt 15:5; Mark 12:38-44) and
toward the sacrifice of repentance (Matt 23:23; announced by John the Baptist fulfilling,
e.g., Ps 51: 6-17). Anderson instead transmits that Tamid is conditioned by “sacrifice
[a]s effective…because it creates relationship by instantiating it”—an
ambiguity when devoted to the transcendent as covering a conditional or
limiting process to neighbors. Jesus comes to remove the bordering and gating
of service imposed on the people, street corners, and countryside by a
clarification of the Providential initiatives of grace flowing to the city and
not mediated by the institutional temples of religion.
To the extent that these
architectural constructions become tied to conditional theologies, they can
only fail in their operations because of the self-interested sins of the new
generations of systematizing enactors, so that historical destruction ever
looms for the material structure but never for God’s promise of an eternal
house, a destiny. The loss of the centralizing altar of the Ark in the later
history of the Solomonic Temple foreshadows—indeed reveals—the contingencies
and responsibilities involved in determining to build a house for God with
tabernacle allusions and a tribal priesthood.
A related,
questionable exegetical feature of Anderson’s retrojection of an
institutionalized hermeneutic of continuance is his adopting the critical
academic rendering of Daniel 8 (pp. 84-5). He situates Daniel 8, repeatedly
contextualized as a vision, as a symbolized report of the temple profaning
event of Antiochus Epiphanes IV. He thereby follows the academic tradents that
condense the reports of the Book of Maccabees with Daniel’s vision. However,
there is a profound prophetic dimension to Daniel that does not require
journalism of Macabbean engagements to *unscroll. Rather, the reports of Ezra
and Nehemiah (See Olds 2023a Appendix V; Olds 2014) and fulfillment in the
birth announcement narratives in the Gospel of Luke (Olds 2023b).
III. Methodological eclecticism and faulty
authorities
Such exegetical problems as the above manifest Anderson’s
source methodology and hermeneutics of institutionalized themes that overwrite
historical sequence and territorial emplacement in the Biblical witness.
Anderson’s presentation locates its support in an idiosyncratic application of
Athanasius, Talmudic, modern critical academic, and a single Roman Catholic
Church liturgical rite--a lurching through time and space absent consistent
rendering of times and spaces as bounded by immanent events. Rather, he moves
to transcendentalize the historical material. As noted, other than a routine
revisting of the Johannine Prologue to translate skēnē as “tabernacle”
rather than tent, the NT witness is mostly excluded in this book. If he had
consulted the NT responsibly in a book marketed to Christian pastors, he would
have had to engage its consistent rebuttal to “continuance of form” history of
religion method and findings.
To wit, Anderson claims that a
thematic interruption of narrative validates his reconstructions of temporal
sequence as on page 154 discussed above. These narrative reconstructions of
structural meaning are situated on the precipices of methodological fault lines
that tear and swallow his findings. For example:
The presentation of the
tabernacle across Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers is ordered just as much by
theme as it is chronology. Exodus is devoted to the structure of the
tabernacle, Leviticus 1–10 to the service of the altar, and Numbers 1–10 to the
role played by the tabernacle in guiding the Israelites to the land of Canaan.
Sometimes events that occurred
in a single moment are separated from one another to fit into their proper
thematic section. This is made explicit in Numbers 7 when our writer introduces
the story of the tribal chieftains’ gifts of wagons and draught animals to
transport the tabernacle. Though the unit belongs in the “guidance” section of
our narrative (thus its placement in the book of Numbers), the gifts themselves
were given on the day the tabernacle was erected (Num. 7:1). Had
chronological time been the strict principle of organization, this narrative
should have been located at the close of the book of Exodus (Anderson 2023,
10 emph. added).
Anderson had proposed, “The Exodus story of the tabernacle’s
founding is written in such a way as to fold the dedication of the altar into
the rite of erecting the tabernacle (ibid.).”
If there are interruptions in the narrative temporal sequencing,
Anderson has noted (in the highlighted opening to the paragraph quoted above)
that chronology orders the Torah presentation of the Tabernacle while theme
plays a role. All this may be proper and responsible exegesis, but then just
prior to that he has made this astonishing statement that does not derive from
his explanation so far but finds its authority outside the canon or tradition:
Because the onset of the cult
points back to the creation of the universe, the nonlinear character of time at
creation reappears here as well. Beginning in Exodus 25 the restless advance of
chronological time slows to a halt and even, in some places, flows backward.
Sacred time, as Mircea Eliade has argued, is “indefinitely recoverable,
indefinitely repeatable. From one point of view, it could be said that [sacred time]
does not ‘pass,’ that it does not constitute an irreversible direction
(ibid., emph. added.)
This methodological move again demonstrates the fatal flaw of
Anderson’s work: he makes an astonishing, unsupportable, and
retrograde-by-its-very claim that time is flowing backward in the establishment
of the priestly Torah, and bases this claim on a non-applicable, canonically
non-supported hermeneutic—a politically “gnostic” backlook--of
Eliade.
That God would need to go back
in time to reorient history to God’s will suggests that an interruption of God’s
will had taken place to such an extent as to reveal that time, rather than the
medium of contingencies, is itself contingent to forces outside of God’s free
and natural knowledge. At the very least, it seems, this vitiates traditions of
divine simplicity, divine omniscience, and divine omnipotence, as well as
introducing a non-Trinitarian, dualist metaphysics abridging the simplicity of divine
conation (Olds 2023a Appendix I). On the other hand, if the Creator’s eternal
purview allows for time’s reversal, it must be asked how such guides creatures
to freedom responsible to neighbors and the non-human order. In order not to
make a dilemma of metaphysics, it would have to be proposed that such
manifestation of God’s radical freedom serves a point of the necessary human
knowledge of God’s absolute transcendence. But such a point makes for another
dilemma: that such radical, seemingly mercurial incomprehensibility encompasses
and vitiates revealed Christological immanence by a point of hermetic
transcendence. Such does not accord with Christ’s words regarding his knowledge
of the Father and the Father’s will in the Gospel of John. And even if it does
not vitiate Christ’s immanent ministry, there is no revelation to Christ’s
immanent ordering of such incomprehensibility of will.
At this point, it becomes
necessary to extensively rebut Eliade and his commitment to asserting a
cyclical view of time derived from non-monotheistic traditional societies
rather than an understanding of teleology (however phylogenetically and
ontogenetically fitful) that emerges in Judeo-Christian scriptures and
traditions.
[The] Romanian historian of
religion proposed that ‘traditional’ societies lived in ‘cyclical time,’
innocent of history . . .
In traditional societies,
according to Eliade, everything important has already happened. All the great
founding gestures go back to mythic times, the illo tempore, the dawn of
everything, when animals could talk or turn into humans, sky and earth were not
yet separated, and it was possible to create genuinely new things (marriage, or
cooking, or war). People living in this mental world, he felt, saw their own
actions as simply repeating the creative gestures of gods and ancestors in less
powerful ways, or as invoking primordial powers through ritual. According to
Eliade, historical events thus tended to merge into archetypes. If anyone in
what he considered a traditional society does do something remarkable –
establishes or destroys a city, creates a unique piece of music – the deed will
eventually end up being attributed to some mythic figure anyway.
The alternative notion, that
history is actually going somewhere (the Last Days, Judgment, Redemption), is
what Eliade referred to as ‘linear time’, in which historical events
take on significance in relation to the future, not just the past. And this
‘linear’ sense of time, Eliade insisted, was a relatively recent innovation in
human thought, one with catastrophic social and psychological consequences. In
his view, embracing the notion that events unfold in cumulative sequences
[teleologies in ethnic—language-bound structures], as opposed to recapitulating
some deeper pattern, rendered us less able to weather the vicissitudes of war,
injustice and misfortune, plunging us instead into an age of unprecedented anxiety
and, ultimately, nihilism. The political implications of this position were, to
say the least, unsettling. Eliade[’s . . . ] basic argument was that the
‘terror of history’ (as he sometimes called it) was introduced by Judaism
and the Old Testament – which he saw as paving the way for the further
disasters of Enlightenment thought.
Applying this evaluation of
Eliade’s religious historicism, Anderson thereby misapplies a traditional
society’s understanding of time as non-linear (recurrent) to the ethnic archive
of the Israelite people—to the Torah—in which linearly unfolding time
(teleology) takes hold of the Israelite (Priestly Theologian) religion from the
creation ex nihilo. Other than post-Biblical midrash cited by
Anderson and wishful thinking of those in the existential crises of reproach,
God does not go backward in time in the Biblical witness. God is a God of
history, not a systematic principle of force(s). Perhaps God could outside the
cosmos in which the Bible witnesses to the Word of God--the Beginning, which
includes the relationship of cause and effect. But as God’s witness to
humanity--God’s relation with temporally and geographically bound humans
directed to live morally and responsibly—living with both freedom and
necessity--within both the future and contemporary boundedness of regions, God
in and with humanity does not move backward in time! For if so, what is the
need for the Gospel’s atoning repair and the death of the Son? For the
incarnation? Anderson’s temporally loosed hermeneutic and any midrashim on
which he claims to find warrant are out of the bounds of mature, academic
witness to Biblical history and the unfolding flows of grace and reparative
processing of the Spirit.
[Eliade’s kind of ]“terror of
history” leads… [to] a cyclical, palingenetic reading of history to… make the
God of the Bible into a [recurrent]
Baal. A vindictive Canaanite war god …The Hebrew and Christian
scriptures repeatedly demonstrate that … the living God desires progress in
peacefulness, in courage, in commitment to life, in virtuous neighborliness so
much that even the terror of death be conquered. And that terror, to be
vanquished, has to be unexpectedly conquered by embracing the [future not
living mired in past regret or dreamy nostalgia. With justification, Christian
hermeneuts commit to a more generational re-engaging, mirroring, bumpy yet]
linear, ontogenetic trajectory [and] the Spirit-led unfolding of history
revealing …the wonder of advances and betterments, albeit recognizing they are
subject to episodic loops of [spiritual, interior lives experienced as]
reversal. Yet these loops are always followed by recovery of trend—of
Spirit-led historical development. [Teleology] is the ever-renewing though
challenging [awareness of the] forward trajectory of collective and individual
soul growth that overcomes the margins of sin, chaos, fear, and anxiety (Olds
2023a, 153-5 emph. added).
Anderson’s substantial errors introducing his interpretation
of religious history—his existential misinterpretation of time that reports
that the tabernacle makes Sinai mobile-- are compounded by his rerooting of
place. By incorporating both the Aqeda and Golgotha within the “tabernacle
narrative” as he ignores the Kippurah implications of Leviticus 16 suggests
a way to trace from the perspective of
the Priestly theologians to their focus on the “furnishings.” These participate
in revealing, (using tendentious translations)
“God’s face” accelerating with the Book of Numbers (ch. 3 esp. pp. 62-6; 212).
Whether this “face” is of an essential portrayal or a symbolic representation
of divine attributes is unaddressed.
Then, after a considerable historical gap in the architectural archive of the
OT, the sacrificial cult resumes in Solomon’s temple with the architecture
proceeding from David’s volition (Ps 132:4a-5; cf. footnote 5 above), and then
another considerable gap into the period of the Second Temple decreed by Cyrus
on his architectural format (Ezra 6:3). These meaningful gaps in the narrative
of sacrificial structures presented by the OT histories are unaddressed by
Anderson. When, in Part II, he connects historical texts with the Priestly
source, he reaches not into the NT for confirmation but for Talmudic and
contemporary scholars outside the confessing Christian tradition to support a
Systematic Theology of territory and structure—P’s theology of time and place
that Anderson presents as the Priestly theology that the tabernacled altar and
ritual service complete—as the 8th day of—God’s creation [pp. 102-103,
referring to the linkages of unnamed medieval rabbis summarized by one modern
academic, Shaefer].
Does the 8th Day of Creation
invert providence, making the human subject responsible for “feeding God” at
the sacrificial spot? Here, a deeper investigation of the processes of the
tabernacle needs to be unpacked as to subject/object, client/master relations:
In Exod. 25:2: the appended first person suffix objective
pronoun is translated by Anderson (29) as a dative of advantage, but the LXX
has it as a genitive (source or possession)! What is being returned to God who
has provided. But why is this an advantage for God? Anderson later locates
the sacrificial impulse in the ANE ritural concern to “feed God” (p. 100). But
can that be so when God “appears and provides” as in the Aqeda?
God specifies to Moses to
construct an altar in the plan of the tabernacle (Exod. 25: 1-8; 27:2)-- a
mizbeaḥ:
Mizbeaḥ “throughout the Semitic linguistic sphere
[follows] the semantic scope of Hebrew zāḇaḥ, “slaughter, perform a zeḇaḥ ritual,
sacrifice… mizbēaḥ can
refer to the slaughter site… to the place of zeḇaḥ, and to
the sacrificial site in the general. (Dohmen 1997,
8.210 emph added).
The translation “slaughter site,” noteworthy for its ANE
contextualization, is chosen by Fox (1995, 410)
Here, the LXX points to a
categorical distinction involved in emplaced sacrificial ritualization: “The
Septuagint renders mizbēaḥ
primarily with thysiastērion; 23 times it uses bōmós, though only in reference
to illegitimate pagan altars” (Dohmen, ibid.). Of θυσιαστήριον, LSJ notes this
“altar” is a place of sacrifice and a place “fitted for sacrifice.” To the
question: what are the “fit” objects for such sacrifice? God gives the
list in Exodus, after the Golden Calf episode, beginning with the peace
offerings in 25:2.
These items are contextualized
in Exod. 27.1: offerings are “contributions,” not in the sense that God needs
to be fed, but what humans offer up in sacrifice of their own appetites that
derive from a certain, pre-reformed human nature--personality types driven by
the covetous and hoarding instincts of flesh. In giving up these things--these
features of their enmeshment in and by nature--they move toward the Godly
essence, which is the conation of grace (Olds 2023a), sharing provision and
dispensing with the hold on human personality (its heart of stone set on stone)
that these commodities exert and which inhibits their sharing.
To trace the ebb and flow of the
collective ethnos in its archived witnesses, and its changing ideas of
God’s “dwelling” in mediated or direct sovereignty, the canonical proxy for
Anderson is the Priestly Theologian’s claim that the temple is the 8th Day
completion of God’s intended creation (p. 103; chap. 7) and its sacrificial
dimension. To be canonical in a more collective and archival way, such must
include at the outset a consideration if not incorporation of the foregoing
historical datum of the Aqeda followed by the Bethel stone pillar of Jacob in
Genesis 28. AND Leviticus 16’s ritual of atonement. In both of the former, God
initiates a meeting. In the first, a call and then a resolution for sacrifice,
where God provides, calling Abraham’s awareness to God’s sourcing all gifts and
therefore righteous in calling for their offering. In the second, the Abrahamic
(natural human) impulse is to follow an encounter with God with a stone
structure—to settle at the spot as if the finite ground has an
institutionalized signification from theophany. By virtue of the twice utter
repudiation of the temple-making impulse and role performance, and the various
intermediate profanations and sackings of the implements, should put
commentators on notice that the institutionalizing impulse rendered in stone is
not religiously or historically progressive in the canonical witness. Instead, it
is the mobile tabernacle that is decreed and designed of God, and its summary
as a place of witness (testimony, tutelaries of signification) when the miškān
is linked with the ʾōhel môʿēd in integuments of
signification. The ʾōhel môʿēd is where God’s appearance is signified
in the NT witness, though the distinctions of the two structure are entangled
in the OT as translated by both the LXX and the Vulgate.
Exod. 40:34 distinguishes, by
way of cloud and kəbôd, the miškān and the ʾōhel môʿēd. To see that these are
processive distinctions of process, not instituted forms, revisit Anderson’s
chart on p. 154. Moses entered the cloud on Mount Sinai in Exod. 24:18 but is
unable in 40:35. The tabernacle is a stage of pilgrimage, not a recurrence of a
Mosaic investiture.
The miškān (covered by a tent of
ram’s skin curtained by goat hair Exod. 26:14; 36:14). Anderson consistently
reads the ʾōhel môʿēd, as indeed sometimes does the
LXX, as a synonym for the tabernacle. In this, he initially follows, by
quoting, Brown but misreads the latter’s conclusion (p. 2, emph. added):
The theme of “tenting” is found
in Exod 25:8–9 where Israel is told to make a tent (the Tabernacle—skēnē) so
that God can dwell among His people; the Tabernacle became the site of God’s
localized presence on earth…. When the Prologue proclaims that the Word made
his dwelling among men, we are being told that the flesh of Jesus Christ is the
new localization of God’s presence on earth, and that Jesus is the
replacement of the ancient Tabernacle.
As replacement, how then does
Anderson immediately and elsewhere consistently “link” John’s Prologue to his
translation that the Word “tabernacled” among us? Why does a replacement for
the tabernacle in the incarnation come to be incorporated into it by Anderson’s
translations and his almost exclusive, concentrated focus on John’s Prologue as
the proxy for and signature of the incarnation? Because Anderson ignores most
other relevant NT considerations, it would seem he would have to be very
careful about how he translates skēnē in John 1:14. Rather, to apply some necessary
linguistic and contextual frame from the perspective of the replacement, not
from what is replaced! Why not read the verb of John 1:14 diachronically: “ἐσκήνωσεν”—as
tenting’s transitional feature, from Bedouin abode to traveling sanctuary to an
effulgent tent’s sent witness (skēnōma) and back again to an immanently situated
mobility of teaching in the spiritual deserts of the earthbound marked by generational
change and renewal?
Does Anderson think Jesus, as
incarnated covenanter, manifests the Tabernacle’s curtaining integuments of
goats and rams, its implements assembled altar-ward (rather than outward) and
ritual garb and pieties?
Anderson’s synonymizing of tent
and tabernacle needs far more validation before it can be said to lead to the
temples, and that Jesus’s incarnation is institutionalized by the tabernacle-to-temple
narrative in the way Anderson proposes. That Jesus is in some meaningful way following
and endorsing--by simple restructuring of the priesthood--an architectural path
of incarnated stone rather than a tutelary and atoning incarnation that reveals
how sacrifice is righteous not by its justice but by its mercy and self-discipline
for the sake of grace.
Unpacking the textual history of
the LXX, the MT, and the Vulgate of this set of residential-made-institutional
constructs in various territorial and spiritual settings manifests the
complexity that leads translators to synonymize the ʾōhel môʿēd and the miškān, both
contemporaneously and diachronically. Thereby ignoring the layering of
elements: altar, sanctuary, curtains, roof coverings, tentings in the
Tabernacle and the ʾōhel môʿēd, that is then incorporated
into the miškān and the later temples, both on earth and in the visions of Ezekiel
and John the Revelator.
The solution of the history of
religions approach is to harmonize and institutionalize these structures as a
foundationally recurrent and thus enduring form. A spiritual, reformed approach
rejects eternities of earth-bound forms and instead looks for the process of
eternity’s synchronic imprint in the texts and history, discerning any
diachronic teleology of what is materially and historically represented. Because
teleology is expected as Christ becomes all-in-all, humanity shares in Christ’s
mission and destiny. The rise and fall of Judeo-Christian institutions impart
meaning.
When the Clementine Vulgate
terms the ʾōhel môʿēd, tectum fœderis (Exod.
40:30; 33), it seems appropriate to consider the meaning of an integument of
signification. It consists of curtains made of skin and hair, which portion
a body’s integument, and we read of its ram skin and goat hair. The tabernacle
has as its tent-roof a covering of signification and covenant. In this frame,
the Exodus generation meets ritually to develop, or not, the faith of Abraham with
testimony to this commitment. According to the Shema, the OT people’s call to
love God with all môʿēd (strength:
Deut 6:5) is part of its call developed in the tabernacle and reflected on
earth by a tent-bound integument. Might the ram skin be the integument of Davidic
warrior forces (the death of beloved sons securing the Zion’s mode—e.g. Jonathan)
or the goated hair the integument of angels ascending mountains (contra Song
6:5b) or turning traitor when Azazel met and re-engaged of it and set climbing
by other tactics? Might the integument be the manifest part of the testing and
spiritual body derived in a tabernacle movement of covenant signification?
Part 4: Hermeneutic gaps in the architectural
systematics of recurrence
The above section spoke of Anderson’s “temporally loosed
hermeneutic.” This ties in with his hermeneutic of spatial looseness (historical
porosity he might align with his idea of “ontological leakage”): with how he
moves boundary lines imposed on his source strands to interpolate the Aqeda (Genesis
22) and the Cross into his materialist systematizing--his institutionalization
of the Temple as an absolute of the OT canonical “formalism” of the Priestly
theologians. Before he makes these moves, he omits two crucial historic-spatial
aspects of sacrificial time and place: the Scapegoat ritual of Leviticus 16 and
how, after a 300-year historical gap, the temple-making impulse of monarchs
ties with the Tabernacle-centrality of his systematizing narrative.
Taking up the second problem
first, Anderson gives the scriptural warrant that theophany in 1 Ki 8:10-11
provides the basis for the continuance of the Mosaic Tabernacle and its
services. But Anderson’s continuance of form theology does not analyze the
historical dimensions of the tabernacle and the two succeeding temples.
In the former, the precise
instruction given to Moses made the Tabernacle an initiative detailed by God,
while for the temples, the initiative to build emerged from the dynastic
impulse. In David’s case, after he receives God’s promise of a house, his
intent is to mirror that promise by situating God in a house as an externalized
and validating warrant (Ps. 132:4-5; 2 Sa 7: 5-7). In Cyrus’, after he received
Israel’s God’s instruction to liberate the captives to return from exile in
Babylon. In each of these cases, God initiated a reform of temporal sovereignty
inside new national conditions (first under a king, then as a vassal state).
The historical function of the later dynastic temple on Cyrus’s format is a
re-figured and refiguring institutionalizing of the Davidic temple under ephemeral
conditions of dynastic vassalage and expanded in its terminal phase by Herod.
In both cases, the temple
institution flowed from dynastic impulses to advertise, by mirroring, a special
relationship with the divine. At that point, the survival of institutions
becomes seen in the Biblical witness as contingent on the dynast’s and their
proxies’ performances of intentions to mirror the divine volition indeed, and
to the extent they themselves proclaimed such, they were held to that account
(cf. Matt 7:2; 2 Sa 7).
At this point, we might trace the architectural dimensions of material
institutionalization of these claimed special relationships:
1)
The miškān altar was made
of Acacia wood and is 5 x 5 x 3 cubits (Exod. 27:1; 38:1) while Solomon’s
temple’s altar was overlaid with gold (1 Ki 6:20) and the bronze altar far
larger: “twenty cubits long, twenty
cubits wide, and ten cubits high” (2 Chr. 4:1).
2)
The house that King Solomon built for the Lord
was sixty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high 1 Ki 6:2; cf
2 Chronicles 3:3).
3)
Cyrus’ temple magnifies
these dimensions: Ezra 6:3 (NRSV): “In the first year of his reign, King Cyrus
issued a decree: Concerning the house of God at Jerusalem, let the house be
rebuilt, the place where sacrifices are offered and burnt offerings are
brought; its height shall be sixty cubits and its width sixty cubits.”
Thus, the dimensions of
institutionalization of the tabernacle into temple form magnifies the grandiose
representations of dynastic intentions. Whereas Isaiah prophesied that Cyrus
would rebuild the “city” (Isa. 45:13), like Saul he diverts from administration
into religious venues. The second temple is built on Cyrus’s format (Ezra 6:3).
It introduces a spatial dimension to the vassalage (cf. Deut 17: 14-20) of
post-exilic Yehud and becomes more grandiose during Herod’s puppet hegemony.
This material and institutional magnification accompanied a reduction in
sovereign autonomy, imposing pagan hegemonic aesthetic impulses into the mix of
ethnically assertive dynastic and pious impulses addressed earlier by the
Josianic reforms.
None of this is addressed by
Anderson. He situates the temples as the natural outgrowth of the tabernacle
phenomena in a history of religion approach to recurrent institutionalization.
Friedmann (1997 ch. 10)
discusses the connections and the continuities of Temple and Tabernacle and the
Hebrew Bible’s--not the OT's--final redactor (R), whom he identifies as Ezra (242), a
post-exilic Priestly theologian who reorganized the various source tradents (source
strands) to leave the assembled text to reveal a tension of God’s grace and
righteous justice into the 2nd temple period, a tension left hanging and poised
for the expected messiah’s resolution.
In addition to the tension left hanging of God’s primary attributes, the various
strands from pre-R literary sources had different constituencies when posing
their religious life inside this tension.
The redaction of J, E, and D
occasionally can picture God as acting strictly according to justice, and P can
picture his mercy. But, on the whole, the distinction between them is apparent
and dramatic. P’s focus primarily is on divine justice. The other sources’
focus is on divine mercy. And the redactor combined them. When he did that, he
created a new formula, in which justice and mercy stood in a balance in which
they had never been before. They were more nearly equal than they had been in
any of the source texts. God was both just and merciful, angry and
compassionate, strict and forgiving. It became a powerful tension in the God of
the Bible. (Ibid. 239).
It came for Jesus’ atonement to
reveal the priority of grace and the subsidiary operation of justice in the
Trinitarian essence. Getting them out of priority leads to the Anselmic error
and the institutionalizing corruption of Caiaphas’ vassalage administration
(esp. cf. John 11:50). The atonement reveals that God does not require
substitutes, though will provide the means of sacrifice in which we become
aware of God’s presence. Ideed, God has the power to extricate from all evils
of history. And the atonement reveals a
god not contingently bound to some human (Anselmic) idea of righteousness qua
consistency that makes its idea of justice (mirrored on the Cross) foundational
to the liberation of grace (Matt 5:45; Ps 145: 9).
The hermeneutics of assumed
continuance of material form underlies the institutionalizing impulse and
grounds its frames of recurrence. This works both ways: eisegesis grounds
institutionalism (and the dynastic impulse) and dynasty grounds the application
of tradition-recovering and static hermeneutic principles of (ontological)
continuance. Ever the temptation of Abraham to sit down and fall asleep, whence
God calls him to go forth (Gen 12:1).
Hence the necessity to attend to the full—not eclecticized--witness of the
canonical Bible’s development: Its implications of mobility of structure and
calling, the tension of camp and wilderness, of Zion as a city of people and as
a dynastic building program of David and continued later, of the initiative of
agency in institutionalization and the following of appearances of grace’s
initiative with a mirroring claim of processive righteousness. From these,
appropriate interpretive methods are necessary to enter the historical archives
of an ethnos (a language group, not a kinship structure) for
interpreting social arrangements and the (re-)ordering of sovereignty inside
the people of God.
Again, both the non-P strand of
the Aqeda and the institutionalizing impulse of temple making (in DtH and
post-exilic strands) must be integrated, per a “canonical” reading of the OT,
not from the centrality of P as manifesting the recurrent call of the divine to
institutionalize God’s stone dwelling but from a hermeneutical perspective that
takes into account the repeated failures of the institutionalizing impulse
actualized by the prophetic denunciation of monarchic injustices and the twice-destroyed,
much-prophesized, much lamented doomed temples. In other words, the
hermeneutics of human construction of God’s dwelling cannot emerge from a
“continuance of form” theological hermeneutic but rather a hermeneutic of continuance
of Spirit—the Spirit-processive hermeneutic remains tethered to the historical
dimensions of time, space, and their sequential imposition of necessity. While
reinterpretations of history are appropriate as hermeneutical methods are
updated by the processing Holy Spirit, traveling outside the immanent
collective in a transcendentalizing approach to material forms is not.
David institutionalizes a
mediating relationship of sovereignty over the people, mirroring God’s living
promise of an eternal “house” with his impulse to find a “house” for God in the
manner he knows from his context: the ANE ziggurat constructed along an
architectural path of blazing a climb to heaven. While this may not have been
David’s idea, Solomon is represented as building the temple where the
institutionalzing impulse attempts to secure the Davidids confidence in the
enduring promise of earthly sovereign continuance. The OT does not address how
God directs the temple construction, detailed as it is for the tabernacle. The
altar and Tabernacle have a direct design deliverered to Moses from God. Not so
the Solomonic temple. The Tabernacle and altar services were taken up into the
temple rituals (and may, from a critical point of view, have originated there).
So as the Temples fall, at least
two competing strands of explanation are discerned in the OT witnesses. The
Temple service and ritual performance failed or were illegitimate (an
explanation more prominent during the Herodian temple phase of Judaism, where
both King and Priestly castes were [seen as] invalid) or it was the collective
people’s sins that were responsible (this characterizes the dominant southern
prophetic strands accompanying the first temple’s destruction and the tension
of city and temple in the Psalms.
Aqeda
re’iyyah in the Aqeda is linked to God’s provision of a
sacrifice. So that in sacrifice is God’s provision manifest and dedicated.
re’iyyah is made a substantive in the place name of such: Mount Moriah.
The place of the Aqeda is stated
to be Mount Moriah in 2 Chr 3:1, the site of the Temple Mount nearby to
Golgotha. (Schnittjer 2006, 133). All Biblical and archeological accounts cited
by Corbo (1992) place the site of the Crucifixion outside the city limits of
Jerusalem at the time:
“It must be noted that
after the death of Jesus, the area of Golgotha was included within the
Jerusalem city walls by Herod Agrippa I (AD 40–44.)” (Corbo 1992, 1072 emph.
added).
While Schnittjer places the site
of the Cross at the site of the Aqeda, Mount Moriah, Anderson places the temple
on Mount Moriah following 2 Chr 3:1 and assumes the site of the Cross and the
Aqeda into an historical harmony and geographic overlap with temple.
However, Drinkard (2006 loc cit.
emph. added) notes a basis to question such a triple historical linkage:
Moriah is mentioned twice in the
OT. 1. Moriah is the region (the Hebrew is literally “the land of the Moriah”)
where Abraham is sent to sacrifice his son Isaac (Gen 22:2); specifically, he
is directed to one of the mountains that God would show him in that region.
2. Mount Moriah is identified as
the place where Solomon built the Temple; it is the place previously revealed
to David, the THRESHING FLOOR of ORNAN the Jebusite (2 Chr 3:1; Ornan = ARAUNAH
in the full account in 2 Sam 24:16-24 ). This is where David built an altar and
offered sacrifices to stay the plague God had sent as a result of David’s
presumptuous census.
Since these are the only
occurrences of the name Moriah, they are often assumed to refer to the same
place. The distance from Beer-sheba (where Abraham and Isaac’s journey began,
Gen 21:31-33 ) to Jerusalem is about 45 mi., a distance appropriate for the
three-day journey (Gen 22:4). However, it is surprising that there is no
mention of Abraham, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, or the altar (Gen 22:9) in the
account of the threshing floor in Samuel or Chronicles.
From this, it seems reasonable
to assert that the Biblical witness is more definitive in its witness that
geographically links the Aqeda to Jerusalem (and Moriah) than the Davidic site
of purchase to the Aqeda. If this is so, it is more reasonable, and thus
necessary, to link the geography of the Crucifixion to the sacrificial site of
the Aqeda first, and only then to explore the geographic parallels with the
Temple. Again, this is inverted in Anderson’s presentation of a geographical “narrative”
of form.
Golgotha as a geographical
parallel prefigures the typology of sacrificial substitution of blood (NOT for
wrath [see Olds 2023a Appendix III])—of the ram for the people embodied in the
hope of the promised child Isaac—and the sacrifice of the promised child Jesus
as a substitute for the people.
Leviticus 16’s Atonement
Porter (2021, 284) subordinates the place of the sacrifice in
Leviticus 16 to that of the place in Numbers 7: “references to atonement in
Lev. 16 are secondary to the revelatory function of the ‘mercy seat.’” He links
hilasterion not to a place of sacrifice where blood is sprinkled, but to
a site of revelation of declared righteousness, thereby bringing sacrifice to a
relationship with forensic mercy, such that mercy in declared
righteousness is effected in some way by sacrifice, linked by Porter,
predictably with “faith.”
Porter at least engages,
errantly, with Leviticus 16. Anderson, on the other hand, omits references to
it except as “spiritual repair” for “gross priestly errors” (PP. 11; 90): “According
to the opening verses of Leviticus 16, the purpose of this atonement rite is
far more specific: to deal with the aftereffects of what Aaron’s sons have done
wrong” (102). Contrary to his statements that sacrifice in the OT were not
concerned with sin (p. 76; contrast 90
n. 17), if he were to include a responsible reading of the entirety of
Leviticus 16, he would see that the goat sacrificial rituals apply to sin and
transgression of the people (Lev. 16: 15), the children of Israel
(Lev. 16.21), not just of the priests.
Sacrificial atonement processes
through antecedent allusion in the Aqeda and Leviticus (an “outside the camp”
[Leviticus 16] sacrificial system) rather than the “inside the camp” (Nu 1:1)
site of the ritual service of altar’s mercy seat (Nu 7:8) that is the
antecedent of the temple’s. The “outside the camp” sacrifice fits the context
of Golgotha’s (Moriah’s) crucifixion outside of the town of Jerusalem and picks
up the “outside/apartness” nature of God’s revelation of righteousness in Rom.
3:21.
The place of divine revelation (hilasterion)
is a place of speaking in Nu 7:89 (Exod. 25:22). In Nu 12: 8 Moses speaks with
God pe ʾel-pe, “mouth
to mouth,” which the NRSV translates, inappropriately, “face to face.” The
mercy seat is not a form of showing—a forensic seat of justice defined (so
Porter [2021]. Yet certainly not of a bloody and crucified body which visual
representation to the condemnors is a mirror of their injustice. When God
speaks at the ἱλαστήριον, the message not the visual
is the mercy seat, the kippurah, the seat of atonement. The visual is the mirror
of human injustice. The ultimate messaging of the atonement on the Cross is the
embodied blood that draws off sin and the supplication of the Logos met by
transcendent grant of mercy! Both the earthly site of the atonement as mercy
seat sprinkled through blood, and its verbal message that accords with what
happens at that “seat”--an embodiment of revealed injustice that sheds blood
transformed by the transcendent speech-act where expiation is in the divine
blood and supplication! Mercy revealed flowing from the spoken
supplication/petition and confirmed by the resurrection of the body and
following speech acts-- not a body left hanging and bloody—reveals the definitive expression (logos) of the
operation of righteousness:
Rom. 3:21, which Porter (2021)
misreads as he links it to the material ἱλαστήριον
of v. 25, is that God’s righteousness-- δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ (on the
Cross)-- is manifest apart from (or outside of) law/legalism/earthly law, as
opposed to what is witnessed by (Torah) Law ὑπὸ τοῦ νόμου.
The first use of “law” is anarthrous, while the second use has the article.
There is a meaningful distinction of Law in this verse--imparted by the
attachment or absence of the article--that is essential to recognize in the
spatial scene at the Cross. The Cross is a manifestation of law that is not of
God’s righteousness, while God’s righteousness is witnessed by The Law, the
Torah as indicated by its context with the prophets in this verse. It is
likewise essential not to bring inside the camp what is outside the camp at
Golgotha. Or to imagine that righteousness is revealed as forensic forum rather
than in a speech act of the Logos.
Rom. 3:21 Νυνὶ δὲ χωρὶς νόμου
δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ πεφανέρωται
Therefore, any consideration of
atonement looking for the revelation of God’s mercy seat needs to look outside
the camp for a blood sacrifice in a speech act, not in a material form in the
operation of en-templed, administrative legalism. This latter is the error of
Porter (2021, 289; 298), who links the hilasterion to a Numbers 7:89
emplaced implement that reveals the justice of forensic sacrifice that is
linked with mercy (292; 299 n. 31) rather than its substitutionary or tutelary
or cosmically expiatory functions. Anderson’s associated error is the placement
of the atonement inside the camp by incorporating it in some way into his “tabernacle
narrative,” in the environs of the temple precinct. by an abstruse application
of Louth’s historicizing diagram (pp. 213-5; 225-7) that detaches the
incarnation from the atonement (p. 228) except by way pardox: the atonement is
linked to the incarnation which Anderson situates in “the paradoxical,
sacrificial logic of Genesis 22” (pp. 222-23).
This does not mean denying the
role of the cross, but it does entail subordinating the sacrifice of Christ to
God’s primary providential end—the divinization of humanity by dint of the incarnation.
If we follow Augustine’s reading of St. Paul, however, we should be suspicious
of this sort of subordination. The Old Testament does link the indwelling of
God to creation as we have seen, but it also creates an unbreakable bond
between the act of indwelling the tabernacle and the sacrificial service that
will be conducted there. These arches, to return to Louth’s striking image, are
in parallel to one another; there is no subordination. But Louth was correct to
indicate that incarnation can be thought of apart from the demand to rectify
human sin. It is not the case that the incarnation has been made contingent on
an act of rebellion against God (p. 228).
Anderson then goes on to conclude his book,
The purpose of sacrifice in the
Tabernacle Narrative is not first and foremost that of effecting atonement. It
is rather to enable the enactment by Israel of a radical self-emptying before
her God (ibid.).
Nowhere in this book does Anderson explicitly link
divinization with grace or (especially) the Golden Rule. Indeed both terms are
absent from the index, a dead giveaway of an ignorance of both the incarnation
and atonement revealing God’s essence--the conation of grace in providence and
repair. These are not “paradoxically linked” in sacrifice, but developed,
tutored, and witnessed in the tabernacle, and sent into the world as the skēnōma
of Israel, its illuminating force of grace. The glory of the sun that gives
growth by witness and force of gift-giving sustenance. The ultimate of the
latter is the atonement, while the incarnation prepares others to follow this
path into the eternity of grace.
NOTES:
Ellwood
characterizes Eliade as an early admirer of fascism, "nostalgic for
the unities of the distant past...reaction[ary in his]
gnosticism" that delinks the individualist's obligation to collective
progress (viii emph, added)--where only the "wise" individualist can
escape the entrapments and enmeshments of the rootless and ignorant modern
collective. Eliade committed to "antimodernism and antirationalism tinged
with romanticism and existentialism...deeply suspicious...[of] the
Enlightenment...decr[ying] 'decadent' democracy [and] the rootless 'mass man'
its leveling fosters. In contrast, [he] lauded traditional 'rooted'
peasant culture...'the people' [and] the charismatic heroes...who allegedly
personified that culture's supreme values...[Eliade's] distinctive mood of
world-weariness, a sense that all has gone gray [by modernism]--and, just
beneath the surface, surging, impatient eagerness for change: for some
tremendous spasm, emotional far more than intellectual, based far more on
existential choice than on reason, that would recharge the world with color and
the blood with vitality. Perhaps a new elite, or a new leader capable of making
'great decisions' in the heroic mode of old"(p. xi).
Eliade's
philosophy of religion was not theologically-derived, but phenomenologically.
The principal organization imposed onto sacred time and space occurred at the
time of a religion's origins (pp. 5-6). From this, religious phenomena cycled
in folk culture and consciousness, recurring, thereby confirming the
continuation of its forms and figures locked to material nature. Eliade's
ideology of history described above coheres with his philosophy of religion
attendant to forms in time and space, unifying them as a matter of
gnostic--salvific and sanctifying--method. It is from the phenomenological past
that our salvation will recur, and thus we must look ever to the past for the
form of the future transcendent. Quoting Harold Bloom, in such gnosis is
"a dangerous and doom-eager freedom [qua hunger]: from nature, time,
history, community, other selves" (p. 11).
nifʿal — In Biblical Hebrew, ‘stem’ refers to the
relationship of the verb’s subject to the action of the verb.
That is, stems convey grammatical ‘voice’
relationships (Heiser and Setterholm 2013;
emph added).
Anderson's
translation interprets the verb as a Qal and does not account for the Hebrew
locative.
On p. 64, Anderson
presents a similar rendering of Exod. 34:23 which his source translates the
verb as "must see," as if the change from the locative preposition to
the direct object marker אֶת־פְּנֵ֛י introduces intensification of a verbal
imperative (from "shall" to "must"). In contrast to the
earlier cited verse, however, what is increasingly marked in this latter verse
is the direct object which is no longer prefaced by a locative preposition. By
the direct object marking אֶת, the object is more markedly involved than the previous quoted
verse in coordinating the voice of agencies embedded in the
niphal stem, not by a change in the force of the verb. The syntax
imparts passive voice not imperative mood to the verb, consistent with the
Hebrew stem:
Nifals
also have at the same time the passive meaning, e.g. נִסְתַּר
to hide oneself and to be hidden; נִגְאַל to redeem oneself and to be redeemed.
Nifal tolerativum. In some cases the meaning is that of to allow something
to happen to oneself.
(Joüon,
P., & Muraoka, T. (2003). A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew (Vol.
1, p. 150, emph. added). Pontificio Istituto Biblico.)
The "toleration"
by the subject indicated by the niphal stem accords with a (developing)
awareness of the passive voice, a feature of the subject agent being
seen by the object agent.
In both cases, the
predicate of Anderson's translated sources imparts a mistaken English rendering
of perspective from that of the verbal stem in the Hebrew text. The niphal is
not simply "reflexive" (Ibid.), but it does indicate
relationship--processing, coordinating and elucidating--of initiating and
acted-upon agencies. The translation "appear" is far more indicated
in the syntax of the verbal stem and in the processive marking of the direct
object as guiding the interpretation of the niphal in these verses. More
awareness on Anderson's part of these syntactic features is required before he
claims "The Hebrew original" meaning of how the face of God was
encountered.
Zeús
Bōmios or Beʿel Madbachâ, i.e., a numen dwelling within the
stone ...[for some] communit[ies is] the tangible manifestation of the highest
god. Similar interpretations may be found...within the Phoenician-Punic sphere
(Dohmen 1997, 8:211 emph. added).
If this feature of temples
is intended--an ontology in stone--it evidences another feature of Anderson's
history of religion approach to the Hebrew Bible.
In contrast with the
resonating numen of stone architectures as presented by
Anderson--
[and in contrast with the
link of the cloud in Exod. 40:38; Nu. 9:15 et al. by the Shekinah in
the Targum of Isa. 6:5],
--the Tamid service of God
in the temple is the witness of an opened the heart of its servant--the
appearance of God in and linked to the provision of God [re’iyyah].
Revealed as being transformed by witness as commitment—by the repentant witness
of steadied and awakened eyes and disciplined hands and intercessory and
thanksgiving prayer applied for neighbors. The temple is a place for the hearts
of generations to be renewed for witness. The sacrificial system trains the servant
to recognize the imprint of the master, not by "feeding God" but by
giving up what the possessive eye is attached to and sacrificially commit to
the heart of God (Deut 6: 5) to share what is hoarded--to align with the
metaphysics of conative grace. While the divinity is not fed as an object, God
may be fed in his people, part of redistributive function of the sacrifical
altar.
Since
sacrifice in Egypt exhibited primarily the character of a meal for the gods,the
altar itself can also be understood as having been modeled on secular eating
utensils such as the dining mat, table, bowl, etc. The original form of the
altar in Egypt is that of the food plate placed at the cultic location. An
offering mat portrayed with a loaf of bread also serves as a hieroglyph for
offering as such. (Dohmen ibid. 212).
From
this, it can be seen how the temple architecture and furnishings are part of a
reorientation of sacrifice away from feeding God (by feeding priests and elites
and earning conditional merit) and toward a conative sharing of providential
gifts in a sending of transformed hearts into the world for mission and
witness. First the tabernacle and then the temple provide a physical space that
conditions the penitent's awareness that God will be encountered in some way by
the sacrificial offerings, and the operation of the tamid demonstrates and
cultivates awareness of "pleasing" reorientation.
OR de-institutionalize.
A
Documentary source criticism approach (classically of J, E, P, D sources) would
present a different historical flow and set of theological emphases to the
narratives in the Hebrew Bible depending on how these strands were organized.
In 1878,
[Julius] Wellhausen (in Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel) presented
the “Documentary Hypothesis,” which was widely accepted. A number of other
scholars had already anticipated many of his assertions; for example, Graf
argued for the order “JEDP” [with P the latest strand], a view which Wellhausen
popularized in his Prolegomena.
Wellhausen
focused on parts of Genesis and Exodus where the “J” and “E” sources are
distinct from one another. He argued that, in most other parts of Genesis
through Numbers, a later editor or editors combined “J” and “E” into a “JE”
document.
--Stuart,
D. K. (2016). Documentary Hypothesis. In J. D. Barry, D. Bomar, D. R. Brown, R.
Klippenstein, D. Mangum, C. Sinclair Wolcott, L. Wentz, E. Ritzema, & W.
Widder (Eds.), The Lexham Bible Dictionary. Lexham Press.
Without
a reference to the full witness of the NT and the Gospel’s settlement of the
primacy of mercy over judgment, a more universal consideration of the various
source theologies and constituencies other than priests (such as monarchs,
people, prophets) would most likely emphasize a different awareness of both the
atonement and the incarnation (the latter’s “at-one-ment” of God with humanity,
not just with OT priests).
Theologians who resort to the claim of
“paradox” have lost their way to the history of religion.
The Aqeda is a test of Abraham’s resolve to sacrifice his son by whom the promise is to take its next processive, generational step. The sacrifice tests whether the gifts of God derived from God may be called for by God and intended for God’s purposes—God’s people. The Aqeda thus demonstrates at least six comprehensible, incarnational principles of sacrifice: 1) all gifts come from God and may be repurposed by God. 2) As God provided the original gift, God will provide a substitute. In this, God may be recognized in providence’s teleology.3) Sacrifice as a human act offers up attachments to the material gifts of nature and bounty as a training and discipline feature of developing the virtues of the Golden Rule. However, covenanted providence does not require human death. 4) (The idea of sacrifice) is tutelary and preparation for a life of witness through service so its context retains its religio of reverential service even after the altars of Israel fall. 5) God’s arranging a ram as a substitute re-validates the “genetic” (qua faith) promise of destiny for Abraham. 6) The Aqeda prefigures a later, universally effective atoning sacrifice of supplicating blood (embodied witness of the Son to divine essence) and which reveals that God is not a nepocidal agent but a giver of life restored and enduring for purpose (Isaac) and eternalizing (Christ).
CITATIONS (in addition to those given in footnotes):
Alter, Robert. The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999, 233.
Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008.
Corbo, V. C. (1992). Golgotha (Place). In D. N. Freedman (Ed.), & D. M. Elliott (Trans.), The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (Vol. 2, p. 1072 emph. added). Doubleday.
Drinkard Jr., Joel F., Moriah. In The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (electronic edition). Edited by Katharine Doob Sakenfeld. Abingdon Press, 2009.
Dohmen, C. (1997). מִזְבֵּחַ. In G. J. Botterweck, H. Ringgren, & H.-J. Fabry (Eds.), & D. W. Stott (Trans.), Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Revised Edition, Vol. 8). Eerdmans.
Fox, Everett. The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Schocken Bible 1 (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1995).
Friedman, Richard Elliott. Who Wrote the Bible? San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.
Heiser, M. S., & Setterholm, V. M. (2013). Glossary of Morpho-Syntactic Database Terminology. Lexham Press.
[LSJ] Liddell, Henry George, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones, and Roderick McKenzie. A Greek-English Lexicon, with a Supplement. Rev. and augm. Throughout. Oxford : New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 1996.
Olds, Rev. Douglas. “Expect Something New: Messianic Predictions and Advent in 1st C Judea.” Crying in the Wilderness of Mammon (blog), December 13, 2014. https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2014/12/expect-something-new-messianic.html.
Olds, Douglas B. Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism. Wipf and Stock, 2023a.
Olds, Rev. Douglas. “The Gospel Sung In Christmas Carols.” Sermon. Crying in the Wilderness of Mammon (blog), December 24, 2023b. https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-gospel-sung-in-christmas-carols.html
Porter, Nathan. “Between the Cherubim: The ‘Mercy Seat’ as Site of Divine Revelation in Romans 3.25.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 44, no. 2 (December 2021): 284–309. https://doi.org/10.1177/0142064X211049101.
Schnittjer, Gary E. The Torah Story: An Apprenticeship on the Pentateuch. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006.
