Open Notes on Genesis 4
• Is Eve arrogant, gloating? She remarks how she made this child, Cain, with some help from God.
• Cain must have been, to some extent, a good man. It seems that he took the initiative to bring his sacrifices to God. He initiated the first worship service on record.
• The reason for God’s response is not completely clear. What is clear is that he gave preference to Abel’s worship over that of Cain.
Is this where differences in “worship styles” began? I think not. The difference seems to have been more substantive than mere style.
• This is definitely the first “worship war.”
• Cain’s emotional response to God’s choice are understandable. We have all known envy and jealousy when someone else was chosen over us, and we, in fact, were rejected.
• God questions Cain, “What is the problem? Why are you so downcast?” This is a relational God. He seeks to restore a good relationship with this man.
• When God asks, are we to assume it is a rhetorical question? If we bring no theological presuppositions, on the face of it the question might be real. Is it possible that God does not know?
• The first death in the Bible is a death by violence. The murder grows out of religion, worship, and the first full-blown expression of human emotion.
• Abel seems to have been and done right in God’s eyes, but God does not protect him from violence. Being good and doing right obviously is not enough. Why did not God intervene on behalf of the man whose worship he was pleased by?
• After the death of Abel, God again appears and questions Cain for his brother’s whereabouts. Rhetorical or substantive question? Is your answer based on a theology established much later, and accepted by you based on some authority?
• Cain is given the opportunity to tell the truth. God does not hold a “kangaroo court.” He is allowed to testify on his behalf. Evidence is presented.
• The evidence against Cain is the blood of his brother that cries out against him–the testimony of the only witness.
• Cain is given a way out, an escape from the sin that crouches at his door. His future is open if he does well. If. That indicates choice, possibility.
• Even in his punishment, God is gracious and merciful. The “Mark of Cain,” is given for his protection.
• From Cain’s descendants the first city is built. Is there any possible link–indirectly--between religious conflict, envy, jealousy, and murder and the building of a city?
• Is this whole creation, especially the image of God creation, working out as God intended it to?
• Is God in control? What does that mean? What kind and what degree of “control,” whatever that is.
• When the United States Senate held hearings about the Watergate Scandal in the early 1970s, Senator Baker from Tennessee asked each involved party, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” That is an appropriate question to ask in this, one of the earliest narratives of an encounter between God and his human: What did God know, and when did he know it?
• Does Cain have a real choice about doing well and avoiding the sin that crouches at his door?
______________________
I don’t know the answers. I do know the theologically correct answers. I do know what the conventional wisdom has to say. I don’t know the answers. I don’t think we can find easy answers.
Maybe you can. Maybe you have. Maybe you know the answers.
Reread Genesis 4. It gives us things to think on, to meditate on, to pray about, to discuss with each other.
Monday, July 9, 2007
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
A Free Christian
Daddy left the farm and became a Baptist minister when I was not yet two-years-old. Baptist church life has been one of the few constants in my life ever since, Baptist in the sense of “Southern Baptist.” In those early years, one part of Baptist indoctrination was the witticism: “What would you be if you weren’t a Baptist?” The proper answer was: “I’d be a-shamed.” More than sixty years later, I’m still a Baptist, but these days I am too ashamed of Southern Baptists to let many people know of my Baptistity.
So my foundational Christian experience and my theological education developed in the milieu of the “conservative” (occasionally bordering on “fundamentalist”) branch of the Christian church. When, more than two decades ago, Southern Baptists splintered, one group called themselves “conservatives,” and their opposition chose to call themselves “moderates.” Nonetheless, the moderates insisted that they too were conservative. I’ve lived in a world where it seemed that “conservative” was an essential modifier.
When, decades ago, sitting in a Sunday morning worship service at the Southwayside Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, I wrote my personal declaration of independence, two components of that document were: Southern Baptist, and Conservative. I didn’t declare myself a “Liberal.” I felt no need of any sort of label other than “Christ-ian.” At least, that is who I have intended and committed myself to be.
The late Jan Kiwiet, a Dutchman “in whom there was no guile,” gave cogent expression to my self-understanding. Kiwiet was a new professor at our seminary. I was a doctoral student in his first seminar. At times, Dr. Kiwiet talked like a rank fundamentalist, only to sound, thirty minutes later, like a wild-eyed liberal. One day, Charles Fox probed this apparent inconsistency. “Dr. Kiwiet,” he asked, “Are you a conservative, or a liberal.” In his thick Dutch accent, our new professor responded with: “Conservative? Liberal? I don’t know dese tings. I’m a free Christian.”
Why do we add modifiers? Nowhere in the Christian Scriptures is there a commandment that God’s people be conservative. Rather, I suspect that, in the synagogues of his time, Jesus was thought of as quite liberal.
Kathleen Norris, in her book, The Quotidian Mysteries, reminds us that “Christian faith is a way of life, not an impregnable fortress made up of ideas; not a philosophy; not a grocery list of beliefs.” She adds, “The Christian religion asks us to put our faith not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and who desires to be with us in our everyday circumstances.”
It is enough just to be a follower of Jesus the Christ.
So my foundational Christian experience and my theological education developed in the milieu of the “conservative” (occasionally bordering on “fundamentalist”) branch of the Christian church. When, more than two decades ago, Southern Baptists splintered, one group called themselves “conservatives,” and their opposition chose to call themselves “moderates.” Nonetheless, the moderates insisted that they too were conservative. I’ve lived in a world where it seemed that “conservative” was an essential modifier.
When, decades ago, sitting in a Sunday morning worship service at the Southwayside Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, I wrote my personal declaration of independence, two components of that document were: Southern Baptist, and Conservative. I didn’t declare myself a “Liberal.” I felt no need of any sort of label other than “Christ-ian.” At least, that is who I have intended and committed myself to be.
The late Jan Kiwiet, a Dutchman “in whom there was no guile,” gave cogent expression to my self-understanding. Kiwiet was a new professor at our seminary. I was a doctoral student in his first seminar. At times, Dr. Kiwiet talked like a rank fundamentalist, only to sound, thirty minutes later, like a wild-eyed liberal. One day, Charles Fox probed this apparent inconsistency. “Dr. Kiwiet,” he asked, “Are you a conservative, or a liberal.” In his thick Dutch accent, our new professor responded with: “Conservative? Liberal? I don’t know dese tings. I’m a free Christian.”
Why do we add modifiers? Nowhere in the Christian Scriptures is there a commandment that God’s people be conservative. Rather, I suspect that, in the synagogues of his time, Jesus was thought of as quite liberal.
Kathleen Norris, in her book, The Quotidian Mysteries, reminds us that “Christian faith is a way of life, not an impregnable fortress made up of ideas; not a philosophy; not a grocery list of beliefs.” She adds, “The Christian religion asks us to put our faith not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and who desires to be with us in our everyday circumstances.”
It is enough just to be a follower of Jesus the Christ.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
