Tag: the covenant with death

The God Humanity (A Conversation with Dostoyevsky on Free Will)

By: Allan S. Contreras Rios

Note: The quotes found in this blog come from the book The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, unless specified otherwise. Also, this is a translation from a blog in Spanish, so the quotes are translated from Dostoyevsky’s book as well and not exact quotes from an English version of the book.

After the second creation narrative of mankind in Genesis 2, mankind (represented by Adam) is given a warning about eating from a certain tree in the Garden of Eden. The perennial question concerning this tree is: “If God knew mankind was going to sin, why put this tree there?” The common answer: humankind cannot really love God if he does not have the choice to hate him. Not having the choice would be kidnapping, not love. And not having that choice would make us robots instead of humans, according to this reasoning. But is the focus on choice mistaken?

The problem is, that instead of opting for the simple, to love God and what He loves, namely His creation, the alternative is the continual complexity of choice. As Dostoyevsky says, “It is true that nothing pleases man so much as free will; and yet there is nothing that makes him suffer more.” The suffering option cannot resolve itself, as having free-will, in this mistaken understanding, demands choice. That is, free-will (equated with choice) is already a choice against the definitive Divine resolution.

The story in Genesis indicates human choice is a shaping force and the names of the trees indicate how this is the case. The tree of life represents simplicity: to love God and what He loves. This tree does not contain the complication of a dualistic choice. It is a single thing: the tree of life.  It requires participation in relationship with God and His creation and this constitutes life. It is simplicity itself. But the second tree represents the complex in a dualistic choice. That is, the second tree affirms the possible existence of good and evil as independent antagonistic realities coexisting in creation. The lie is, that without one (good or evil), the other cannot exist or be defined (i.e. as in yin and yang). For the choosing to remain open, a dualistic reality is posited.

Another way of saying this is that by not eating of the fruit of the second tree, life is simple (e.g., no bad decisions or false choices, as there is clarifying singular reality). But eating from the second tree constitutes a grounding in human decision: the decision between good and evil. And this complexity and its decisionism displaces the simplicity of knowing God, and it poses an alternative, dualistic, reality.

 It is on this basis that we become our own guides, and the problem is, as Proverbs 16:2 says, “All the ways of a man are pure in his own sight.” As Dostoyevsky writes in several dialogues,

“Well,” I asked him, “what would become of man if he did not believe in God and immortality? In that case he would be allowed everything, even the greatest atrocities.”

What is our destiny if God does not exist… If the idea of God is nothing but the fruit of man’s imagination, how could man remain virtuous?

Everything is permitted to man… If God does not exist, there is no virtue.

Once God is displaced, humanity becomes its own ground, its own god, but it is only in a dualistic world that this god can exercise (deciding) power. The free-will choice already constitutes a world made in the human image. Free-will (in this definition) requires a subjective decisionism, dependent upon human moral choices, which displace transcendent virtue.

We might wrongly blame the first couple for all of our troubles, but the option posed in Genesis continues to present itself: divine versus human or life versus death. Dostoyevsky says that, “Men have eaten the fruit of good and evil, and they continue to eat it.” Day by day we decide, we are the ethicists, and our decisionism is a displacement of divine goodness and virtue.

Maybe God did not place the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to tempt us to do evil, but to give us the opening to the good; to live in eternal simplicity instead of complexity; to live with God as opposed to living in antagonistic dualism, clashing with others and ourselves. The complexity is continually compounded and exponentially multiplied, as Dostoyevsky describes:

New people are living, who want to destroy all that exists, and return to anthropophagy. How stupid! And they have not come to ask my advice! In my opinion, it is not necessary to destroy anything, except the idea of God in the mind of man: that is what we must begin with. Once all mankind has come to deny God, and I believe that the epoch of universal atheism will come at last, as the geological epoch came in its time, then by themselves, without anthropophagy, the old moralists will disappear. Men will gather to ask life for all that it can give, but only and absolutely to this present and terrestrial life. The human mind will be enlarged, will rise to a satanic pride, and it will be then that God-Humanity will reign.

Who determines morality in an atheistic world? If humanity is composed of a quasi-infinite number of humans with different wills that compete, not only with each other, but within themselves, antagonism, opposition, decisionism, constitutes the world. The virus of dualism introduced by the ingestion of decisionism infects from within but manifests itself as a self-imploding “reality.”

Dostoyevsky could be describing the human predicament inaugurated in Genesis 3, but it is continually re-inaugurated. This ongoing “Fall” is not atheism per se but the exaltation of humanity. There is a closure, which implicitly or explicitly excludes transcendent morality. Although many subject themselves to the absurd concept of atheism, they try to live a moral life, which Nietzsche criticized as a form of hypocrisy. Why feel obliged to live out Christian morality if the God of the Bible does not exist? Nature is cruel and we are products of nature, so we should be cruel. That would be a consistent atheism. However, most who consider themselves atheists, live in the discrepancy that reaffirms the dualism of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (presuming, without reason, the good).

We live in a time when as, Dostoyevsky says, humanity “asks life” for things. Let us replace “life” with “mother nature”, “vibes”, “spirit”, “universe”, etc., and we will realize that we do not live in atheism, but in idolatry. As the apostle Paul says, we have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and we worship and serve the creature instead of the Creator (Rom. 1:25). But this projection of divinity onto the creaturely is, as Dostoyevsky portrays it, a continued swallowing of the serpent’s venom. The deadly lie continues to kill. Dostoyevsky writes that, “The important thing is to know how to flee from the lie.” However, this is easier said than done. We live in a world where the lie has become “reality.” What we need is the truth to displace the lie. And that is where the last Adam comes in, namely Jesus (1 Cor. 15:46; cf. Rom. 5:14).

The Gospels describe Jesus’ mission as exposing the lie. The problem is, we may not understand the saving ministry of Jesus as He and the early Christians understood it: deliverance from the bondage of an enslaving lie. The tendency is to reduce salvation to His propitiating death, while his life and his resurrection are not seen as revelatory or salvific. By reducing Christ to a sacrifice, we leave out His ministry, his healing, his teaching, his resurrection, and we cease to see Jesus as the God/human Savior and turn Him into an instrument, displacing the holism of the Gospel. Instead of being “the way” Christ is reduced to a point of law, another decision, in which the focus is human will and choice.  Jesus said in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Here is the true fruit, lost in the lie, and it pertains to everything. Where Christ is reduced to an instrument of the law, rather than being “the way,” He becomes a tool of decisionism rather than a relinquishing of this enslaving “freedom.”

In its metaphorical use, “the way” is the universal symbol of human existence that describes the dynamics of life. In the Old Testament we are told that man is guided by God (e.g., Israel in Exodus), that path of righteousness is the one to walk in order to be wise and not foolish (Prov. 15:19). Similarly, in the New Testament, “the way” is used as a figure for the way of thinking and/or acting (2 Pet. 2:21). What is lost in the lie, is the way of thinking, acting and being. As a sacrifice, Jesus does not constitute the way, but serves an already established way.

The same holds with regard to “the truth.” We tend to think of truth in terms of a concept rather than a person. Truth is embodied in the God/man. To live in relationship with Him, to live “in Christ” (Rom. 8:1) is to live in truth, but this is a relinquishing of the common notion of free-will. This truth does not leave humanity alone, with its free-will, its choices, its imagination, or its autonomy. In Paul’s description, choosing does not enter into the equation, as the two Adams are the heads of two streams of humanity. Romans 5:12 says death entered the world through one man, and through death, sin, and death spread to all men, whereupon all sinned (Rom. 5:12). Paul’s ordering of this sequence (as rightly translated by David Hart) indicates that death posed as final reality, and Christ exposes this lie, displacing the lie and death with truth and life. In the first, death and evil constitute an alternative reality, in the second this alternative is emptied (eliminating the false choice).

This fits Dostoyevsky’s description in Crime and Punishment, where the false choice is exposed: “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” The power of choice, as in the novel, is by definition murderous and transgressive. Raskolnikov exercises the power of life and death through murdering the old pawn broker. It is a heady drug, this power of life and death, which reduces to nothing and ruin.  Raskolnikov’s power is literally a covenant with death, which Isaiah pictures as the universal predicament. “Because you have said, ‘We have made a covenant with death, And with Sheol we have made a pact. The overwhelming scourge will not reach us when it passes by, For we have made falsehood our refuge and we have concealed ourselves with deception’” (Is. 28:15). Their guilt is to imagine they can manipulate death, as if it is a reality on the order of God. The resolution of Isaiah, is on the order of that of Romans, in that this false choice is eliminated. Isaiah says the covenant with death is annulled (v. 18), exposed by the costly cornerstone of Zion (v. 15). By relocating God as God in our life and denying ourselves (including our power of free-will choice), by Jesus gaining victory over sin and death (exposing their unreality), we put on the singular truth indicated in Eden.

The Satanic Scandal Versus the Scandal of the Cross

In the Bible, both Jesus and Satan are skandalon, or stumbling stones. The scandal or offense, entraps, snares, obstructs, and causes a fall. It is translated as “cause for stumbling,” “cause of sin,” “difficulty,” “hindrance,” “hindrance in the way,” “make fall,” “pitfall,” “stumbling block,” “temptation,” or “temptation to sin.” The Psalms often revolve around those who would kill by laying their snares (Ps. 38:12), setting a hidden trap (Ps. 140:5), and the trap setters imagine they are hidden (“Who can see us?” (Ps. 64:5)), and this is equated with being an evildoer (Ps. 141:9). Intermixed with all this trap setting is the fact of human desire acting to lure one into the trap, thus Saul uses his daughter Michal as a lure for David (1 Sam. 18:21), Joshua warns that the Canaanites, their idols and presumably intermarrying with them, will be a snare (Josh. 23:13), and so too God warns “their gods shall be a snare” and they shall “become adversaries to you” (Judg. 2:3).[1]

Idolatry is equated with a form of prostitution, and the idols play the role of harlots entrapping worshippers in a deadly embrace (e.g., Ez. 16). The obstacle cause of desire, whether idols, gold, golden idols, sex objects, or golden-phallic-idols, consist of giving a divine like status to an obstacle (the obstacle to true divinity). The idol is a scandal, because it simultaneously takes on a divine role and becomes an obstacle to God. The false transcendence gives rise to an exponential desire, which makes the idol “the quintessential scandal, in the Old Testament,” according to René Girard.[2] Entrapment due to desire, whether unleashed by idols or sex objects – which are often equated by the prophets, indicates that human lust plays a deadly role, creating the skandolon.

Idols are a scandal for the Jews but so are Yahweh (e.g., Is. 8:14-15) and Jesus (Matt. 21:42-43). Falling over either sort of scandal causes an exposure, a failure, or a point of shame. The scandal exposed in idolatry concerns the exponential nature of human desire – it is beyond being satisfied and is inherently deceived. That is, there is no end of this pursuit and no gaining what is sought (Ezekiel 23); thus, it is portrayed as deadly in a three-fold sense: it leads to child sacrifice; it imagines death or the grave (what has no life) can give life; it is connected to shame (a living death). Paul equates works of the law, love of money, or simply greed, with idolatrous desire (Col. 3:5-11; Eph. 5:5; Gal. 4:9) and the Christian who would do such things is annulling the scandal of the cross: “Then the stumbling block of the cross has been abolished” (Gal. 5:11). Every phase of the life and death of Jesus might be equated with a form of scandal: his encounters with the scribes and Pharisees, his teachings and parables, but most significantly the cross is a scandal (I Cor. 1:23). To miss the key role of the skandalon is to miss the significance of Christ.

The competition between the one whose head is crushed and the one whose heel is bruised (Gen. 3:15) involves all of human history and all humanity. That is, the satanic scandal is not nonhuman but, as in the story in Genesis 3, it is the offense of the autonomous human world, presumed as sufficient (the knowledge of good and evil, the idol, the law, etc.). The provenance of this mysterious serpent, linked to satan (perhaps not Satan, but the satan(s)), is of the earth, and the poison he imparts, John sums up as a singular deadly presumption: “For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world” (I John 2:16-17). The term “cosmos,” which depicts a closed world, is John’s word for capturing this world of lust or desire, which prides itself on the presumption of life. This is of the world – it is earthly and human in its origins and end. This pride of life describes the original temptation, but is the ongoing presumption that life is “my” possession, while simultaneously in the “lust of the eyes” and the “lust of the flesh” the object of desire (life, being, substance) is lacking.

The role of the serpent is not mentioned by either John or Paul, and yet both seem to be referring directly to the Genesis account. In Romans (7:7), the law models desire or plays the serpents role, in giving rise to desire. For John, love of the cosmos gives rise to the lust of the eyes. Like the serpent which appears from the earth and disappears into dust, this desire is earth bound in its instigation and pursuit. To assign a metaphysical reality to this serpent may be to miss the nature of the scandal. Lust and desire arise around the illusion that the object of desire, be it the idol, money, or some desirous other, can impart substance (life, wisdom, being). The turn to violence to extract this substance from the blood of Abel, the blood of Joseph, or the blood of Christ, is the end point of this obsessive desire.

The scandalous lie, in Isaiah and which Paul takes up in Romans, depicts the rulers of Jerusalem entering into a pact with Sheol (the place of the dead) or a “covenant with death.” This is to make “falsehood” a refuge and it is to attempt to hide behind a deception (Is. 28:14-15). Paul repeats this accusation when comparing faith and works pitting faith (the true refuge) against the law (a lying refuge): “but Israel, pursuing a law of righteousness, did not arrive at that law.  Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as though it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone.” The human race, in the image of Isaiah (repeated by Peter and Paul) have entered a covenant with death, and Christ has annulled the covenant and its effects: “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a tested stone, A costly cornerstone for the foundation, firmly placed. He who believes in it will not be put to shame” (Rom. 9:31-33; Is. 28:16). The Romans, like the Galatians, are being lured by a false teacher to trust in the law; to locate life in their doing of the law, rather than in Christ.  Paul fuses two passages from Isaiah, to picture the singular stone as both tripping up those who are “missing the law,” bringing them to shame, while those who have faith (trust in this scandalous stone), will not be put to shame.

The cross is a scandal, in light of the presumed self-sufficiency (of the Genesis lie, of the covenant with death, or the doing of the law), as it exposes the scandalous lie denying the reality of death and desire. This spiritual battle is not devoid of flesh and blood, but culminates when the one who is lifted up casts out the prince of this world, and as a result all of humanity is drawn to the crucified (John 12:32). It is the “lifting up” which reveals Jesus’ identity as the “I am” (YHWH): “So Jesus said, ‘When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He’” (John 8:28). Here is the realization of Isaiah, that through the “lifted up” servant “you may know and believe that I AM” (Isa. 43:10; 52:13). This lifting up is a saving revelation, applied from “In the beginning” of John: “In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (John 1:4-5). The darkness of the cross is the end point of the satanic scandal, as the cross reverses and exposes the scandal. The stone of stumbling has become the corner stone of a new living temple (I Peter 2:4-8).

The interplay is between the scandalous lie and the scandalous truth in regard to death, with the stone of stumbling or the scandal serving as either headstone or cornerstone.

[1] The list is from David McCracken, The Scandal of the Gospels: Jesus, Story, and Offense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 8.

[2] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 421.