The Flesh, Part 3

As an example of the richness we lose by "civilizing" Paul's language....

When he asks the Galatians rhetorically whether they're going to bring God's Spirit-induced work to its fullness via the flesh, the apostle is talking about their flirtation with the "gospel" preached by the missionaries from the Law-devoted faction in the Jerusalem church. "Flesh" here entails everything alluded to above (the ephemeral human experience capable finally of nothing eternal) and, pointedly in this context, it characterizes this "other gospel" and the law it preaches as "flesh." That is, as belonging to the "present evil age" out of which God has rescued us by His Son (Galatians 1).

To embrace the Jerusalem missionaries' non-gospel and its law (not Moses' law in its proper theological-historical place but a distortion of it that can never accomplish what these missionaries claim) is very simply to return to "the flesh," i.e., to the present evil age.

The polemic is hardly subtle. Paul is calling this other gospel and its law, and by the way its preachers, relics of a condemned, dead world that have no place in the life of the Spirit. The genuine weight of the metaphor as the apostle develops it throughout his writings, and as he lands it stunningly right to the jaw of his opponents here, is simply and brutally dispatched, without so much as a how-do-you-do, by the polite-company Wonder-Bread "human efforts." Along with the fact that Galatians isn't about "faith vs. works" or "grace vs. (Moses') law"....

It's about a life-or-death to-the-finish conflict between two gospels and the very place and nature of Christ ultimately (was the law given to lead us to Christ, or was Christ given to lead the world to the law?). And all of that is implicit in the apostle's merciless dismissal of the other gospel and all its works as "flesh," part of a Christ-less world, the world we no longer belong to. (How we trivialize, monstrously, the depths of meaning here by turning Galatians into a convenient footnote to support our ephemeral preferences: "Oh, that church thinks they're holier because they don't have instruments--they should read Galatians, we're free from the law!" Good grief....)

Had the other gospel won the battle for the heart (!) of the Church...well, we'd likely have never heard of it (the Church, I mean, or Christ). It would have died out as just another obscure offshoot-sect of Judaism, like the Essenes. Yes, it's that big. The Jerusalem church's Law faction and its gospel could never have lasted--indeed, it didn't.

When Paul speaks of our once having known Christ according to the flesh but knowing him so no longer, I am convinced we must take into account the intense soteriological-eschatological weight the metaphor had for him, one that is hardly remote from his use of it in Galatians or anywhere else for that matter.

The "flesh" was the constraints and principles of the created order--yes, inescapably corrupted by sin but not only for that constraining or finally to be despaired of. It is not that we no longer "know" Christ according to "the flesh" (and here, by the way, is another instance where the old standby "sinful nature" would be a comically absurd translation), meaning once we could see and touch him and now we can't. The eschatological nuances of this word come roaring through here. We understand Christ by revelation, by the Spirit, by our citizenship in heaven, by the irruption of the "eschaton," so that we already have "the mind of Christ." We neither meet Christ nor dwell in Him with any thanks to "the present evil age" for a leg-up and a boost into the kingdom. (This is, of course, at the heart of everything Paul writes in Galatians 1.)

Once, "we" (the world) registered and processed this man Jesus by the "light" of its darkness ("Beware lest the light in your eyes be darkness"), i.e., "the flesh," the "present evil age." But now, to anyone who is in Christ, everything is new; the old things (the "flesh," the former and, indeed, still present age) have passed away; by the Spirit we know Christ in the Spirit Who translates us into the kingdom of light.

"All flesh is as the grass of the field," and yet "Death, where is your sting?" There lies the wonder.

Likewise when Paul refers, in the opening verses of Romans, to Christ's descent from David "according to the flesh" but the Spirit's "declaring" him Son of God by the resurrection. Translating "flesh" here as "according to his human nature" commits, in my opinion outrageously, the apostle to an assertion that is very likely (in my opinion, absolutely) not at all what he means.

(Again, why not just let the poor man say "flesh" and let the rest of us wrestle with what he means--isn't that the honest thing to do?)

It's far too early, IMHO, to expect Paul to dive--and fleetingly, and in a mere preamble at that--into a full-blown christological treatment of Christ's two natures. The Church wasn't anywhere near formulating the notions so facilely (almost glibly, really!), and it's even more ridiculous to suppose Paul's supposing his readers would get it even if he did intend that.

Moreover (like Joan Rivers always said, "Can we talk?"), if the opening verses of Romans were such a christological treatment, let's admit we all find them a bit awkward and more disturbing than affirming. What do you mean, Paul, that Jesus was "declared" by the Spirit to be the Son of God, and only at his resurrection? Are you implying that he wasn't the Son of God before that? That he only became the Son of God, by some act of the Spirit, after the resurrection? A simplistic reading of the passage as two-nature christology raises tons of problems, problems that are foolishly undergirded by the escapist translation of sarx as "human nature" (yet another place where "sinful nature" would have been absurd!).

Once more, how 'bout ya just let the apostle say "flesh" when he wants to say "flesh," huh?

If we start from Paul's "flesh" concept and his fiercely eschatological understanding of the inbreaking of the Spirit and our "translation" into His kingdom of light, then this puzzling passage is suddenly worlds clearer.

Under the rubric, the dictates even, of the flesh, the darkened mind of "the present evil age," Jesus is merely the Son of David. Not that it's bad to be Son of David, it's a fulfillment of the prophecies. But there were likely hundreds of thousands of sons of David, they can't all be Messiah or Son of God. As the "flesh that is as grass" would have it, Jesus is, at his most exalted, even allowing his Messiahship, Son of David. Note the very likely dig at the Jerusalem Church Law Faction, who hailed Jesus as Messiah and Son of David. It's as if Paul is muttering an aside at them, "Yes, and that's all you're capable of perceiving, because you are as of yet nothing but flesh, part of the present evil age, devoid of the Spirit."

But it was the Spirit who "declared" (revelation, the act that saved Paul, again compare Galatians 1) Jesus to be the Son of God by the worlds-transcending event of resurrection. It is the Spirit who declares the Son of God to the human heart, and that only because of the Son of God's resurrection. And so, the essential, crucial contrast here isn't between Christ's two natures. Set deeply in the historical context of the raging controversy between the competing gospels, it's a contrast between the flesh (the "present evil age") and the Spirit (the Promise, the revelator, the new birth, the power of the resurrection).

These terms, "flesh" and "Spirit" were signposts to Paul's whole theological horizon, the markers of his realized eschatology.

And we blithely decide that, well, since our muscles and organs aren't inherently evil, and we don't want to confuse people or come off like Puritans, we'd better correct Paul's clumsy bordering on cringeworthy use of such a primitive rubric.

Horrors!

The Flesh, Part 2

And so, to the point, shall we? 

I am persuaded that, in particular for the apostle Paul, as it is his use of the word "flesh" we're really talking about, the word signified everything pertaining to what you might call our human sphere of temporality, sentience, apprehension, capacity, strength, weakness, merit, shame, aspiration, striving, mortality and, ultimately, in and of ourselves, nothingness.  It is all, all, part and parcel of that "flesh that is grass," here today, gone tomorrow, our fleeting moment on the stage called "vanity of vanities." 

Paul wraps that all together under the trenchant rubric/metaphor "flesh," which always brings the prophet's cry to mind, that all flesh (all humanity) is as ephemeral as the grass in the field. 

The metaphor is vastly and profoundly overarching. Yes, it includes a "worldly point of view" and a "sinful nature" and, need we point out, our very bodies, but it is always (possibly excepting--and I don't rush to concede this, either--references "literally" to the human body) a concept immensely greater than the sum of its parts. 

Those who try to make his use of the word "flesh" more, shall we say, civilized inevitably paint themselves into hopeless conceptual corners, where hermeneutically disastrous compromises are made. 

If, for instance, "flesh" is intrinsically "the sinful nature," then what nonsense Paul spouts when he confronts the Galatians over having begun in the Spirit and now attempting to perfect the matter via "the sinful nature." (Imagine the Galatians waking up in the morning thinking to themselves, "God sure started something great through the Spirit; now I'm going to finish what he started via my sinful nature!") 

Of course, that's neither what Paul meant nor said, and no interpreter worth his or her salt would ever produce such nonsense. But since "almost anything is better" than translating sarx as "flesh," the interpreter scurries after yet another civilized rationalization of the apostle's primitive, clumsy metaphor. 

Something perhaps like "human efforts," which kinda-sorta gets at something, a sliver, of the apostle's meaning but is a stringy, flavorless substitute for the richness (soteriological, eschatological and, yes, polemical) of the apostle's metaphor. 

It's as if you rejected the metaphor "heart" and, so, had to come up with a "literal" term or phrase to substitute for it in each of these sentences (for fun, try it) : 

She broke my heart.

I have set my heart upon it. 

All we need to succeed is heart.

Let's try and get to the heart of the matter, shall we? 

We had a heart-to-heart talk. 

He had a heart of gold. 

The alternative is to let the poor apostle use his metaphor intelligently, just as he wanted to, and to read him intelligently, just as we ought to! 

One more installment to come. 

The Flesh, Part 1

In preparation for a course I'll teach, together with a teaching assistant, in November, I'm re-reading (after about 35 years!) Fee and Stuart's "How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth."

I now find myself disagreeing almost entirely with this paragraph:

'In chapter 1 we also noted the difficulty in rendering Paul’s use of the word sarx (“flesh”). In most cases, almost anything is better than the literal “flesh.” The NIV handles this word especially well: “sinful nature” when Paul is contrasting “flesh” and “spirit”; “human nature” in Romans 1:3 where it refers to Jesus’ Davidic descent; “from a worldly point of view” in 2 Corinthians 5:16 noted above (cf. 1 Cor 1:26 “by human standards”); and “body” when it means that, as in Colossians 1:22.'

I believe that, in fact, almost no translation is better than the literal "flesh" where Paul wrote "flesh" ("sarks" or "sarx" in Greek).

Once upon a time the argument made much sense to me, that "flesh" was a metaphor for a kind of nature or inclination, a dimension of experience, certainly not (apart from a few "literal" instances) an overt reference to the physical body, the "meat" we're made of. I now think completely the opposite.

The argument that "almost anything is better" seemed based on two, perhaps three things:

A) a (misguided, in my opinion) urgent solicitousness to rescue believers from the error of dualism, some quasi-gnostic or "eastern" notion that everything material is evil and only the "spiritual" is holy and transcendent--or, if you will, a kind of "Puritanism" obsessed with "the sins of the flesh";

B) an urge, wholly bound up with the previous, to rescue the Scriptures themselves from mocking caricaturization as a Puritan primer consumed with supercilious control of everyone's physical instincts;

C) perhaps a secret fear that Paul (the primary NT user of this metaphor) either was insufficiently aware of the nuances suggested by his use of the word "flesh" or, worse, really did adhere to some obsessive kind of self-denying asceticism in the quest for nirvana-like enlightenment.

All in all, the sense one got was that there was a general embarrassment at the appearance of the word "flesh" in the NT texts, and a fear of its being exploited variously for misguided, self-harming asceticism, or conversely (and ironically) for quasi-gnostic antinomianism (since the "flesh" is of no significance, it doesn't matter what we do in the "flesh"), or for anti-Christian polemic.

And so, it was felt, "almost anything is better" than translating "flesh" as "flesh"--better to tweak Paul's use of the word with our interpretive "translation" (read, paraphrase) of it.

I now disagree entirely. It seems to me that the "almost anything is better" approach epitomizes the error of throwing the baby out with the bath water. In this case we have thrown out depth and nuance together with the sarx.

Paul wasn't an idiot. That seems to me the main thing lost in all this scurrying scramble to "fix" his unfortunate use of a word. As if the poor man couldn't possibly have imagined the embarrassment he was causing (us!) with his primitive, hamfisted employment of such an un-nuanced word so screamingly susceptible to misapprehension. The other side of that coin is, of course, the assumption that Paul's readers are idiots who, unless we cut them off at the pass, will take Paul's word "flesh" and run with it to all kinds of ghastly conclusions. In any case, the thinking seems to go, there is something dreadfully wrong there somewhere, whether on Paul's part, the readers' part, or some combination of the two. Whichever it may be, it requires fixing, and, thus, "almost anything is better" than the word Paul used.

And what do we lose in the unfolding of that miasma of assumptions (about what Paul meant) and fears (as to where it might lead)?

I am persuaded that we lose the profoundest understanding of Paul's entire theological horizon, both soteriologically and eschatologically, in which the flesh-metaphor, utilized across a wide range of contexts and considerations, continues to bring that horizon ever more crisply into view. This is disastrously lost when you insist on reconceptualizing the word in every context, so that the metaphor is not allowed to assert its broad meaning. Then, too, of course, there is the obvious danger, i.e., when you insist on replacing "flesh" with an interpretative paraphrase, to convey "what Paul really meant," you could simply be plain dead wrong, that the apostle wasn't talking about that. The likelihood is huge that, in fact, you are wrong. So what have you done to the text then? Not a service, to say the least.

The Fine Art of Not Caring

How interestingly this cyberage of ours is forcing us to "evolve," to "re-wire," to learn a new "protocol" of perception and filtration of "input." Input that simply wasn't there before and, so, never required filtration.

What I'm learning, with accelerating rapidity, might be called The Fine Art of Not Caring. For example, I enjoy YouTube videos on things like history, cosmology, language, nature, and to some extent political topics, though I'm getting weary of the latter. And, of course, I follow certain channels dealing with the war in Ukraine.

But to get to the videos you'd like to watch you have to plow through a million screaming headlines about things that are "SHOCKING!" and "EXPLOSIVE!"--in short, clickbait.

It is indeed a very healthy thing finally to realize that it's ALL to some extent "clickbait" (just like to some extent ALL advertising is lying) and, then, better armed cognitively, assess which clickbait might all the same contain something of substance behind it.

That is, you have to stop "caring."

You could if you wanted to (if you were crazy enough to) be in touch every minute of every day with every disaster, murder, tragedy, outrage, scandal, controversy, desperate cause and need taking place everywhere in the world. And what would that do to you? And your real, "local" life? Among the people you make a real difference to?

Obviously none of us can sanely live that way. And yet we're exposed to a tsunami of demands for our attention the like of which has never existed in all of human history. It would be incredibly naive to underestimate the toll that takes on us individually and collectively.

Understanding how to respond and deal with that doesn't happen by default. It takes awareness and decisions. Intentionality. This is what I meant by "The Fine Art of Not Caring." It's a new learned instinct, to let the infinite mass of screaming data flow by psychoemotionallly unengaged, unacknowledged, as little more than the trickle of a stream or the wind rustling leaves, or the trundling of a train outside the window (as happens here where I live). It's there but really not in any way that has meaning.

Case in point: Russell Brand. Celebrity. Rape accusations. Scandal. Massive media brouhaha. Yeah, I noted the headlines (HEADLINES!!!). I know it's there. I don't care. Haven't wasted my time opening a single story on it. It's a thing happening somewhere among people I don't know and have nothing to do with, just like a billion other things, including the worst and most awful of things, going on in the world among people I don't know and have nothing immediately to do with. Go on, headlines, flow right by. Whatever that's all about has no stake in my involvement on any cognitive or affective level. In other words, even more than my having no "investment" in it, none of that, in a manner of speaking, has any investment in me. Except, that is, for the financial gain generated by my click.

None of which means I wouldn't "care," wouldn't be empathetic and supportive if faced directly with a rape victim telling me of the horror she went through. But that's not what we're talking about here, is it. We're talking about headlines. We're talking about staring at a screen. We're talking about getting minds and feelings all bunched up in a knot over a news story. It really is a completely different thing, and woe betide anyone who doesn't understand that difference. Not understanding the difference is the recipe for Cyber-Madness.

Each of us has a certain and very limited "caring" quotient, and it spreads only so far, because none of us is God. It doesn't mean we are actively callous toward the reality of suffering and injustice anywhere at any time. It simply means none of can carry the psychoemotional burden of all the suffering and injustice everywhere and all the time. We're not made for that. It's not normal.

Ultimately it's not even real but, rather, becomes a farce and parody of itself if you try it.

Which, somehow, we understood instinctively before the internet cropped up to "connect" us (it sounded so wonderful, didn't it!) to the whole world all the time.

It felt like power. And, indeed, there was power in it.

Only the power wasn't ours.

I find myself lately re-taking power through "The Fine Art of Not Caring." I am, actually, a deeply caring person, and I don't say that as a boast. I think, really, we all are, aren't we? We all feel. But we need to learn a decided sort of executive functioning and what may seem (until we get used to it) a cruel, summary sort of instinct to ignore and dismiss input screaming for our attention, in order to exploit the tools presented by today's cyberspace rather than be exploited by them. To be people, not cyberspace cogs.