Denise Levertov, A Cure of Souls.

The pastor
of grief and dreams

guides his flock towards
the next field

with all his care.
He has heard

the bell tolling
but the sheep

are hungry and need
the grass, today and

every day. Beautiful
his patience, his long

shadow, the rippling
sound of the flocks moving

along the valley.

– Denise Levertov, 'A Cure of Souls', in Poems, 1960–1967 (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1983), 92.

On Genesis 3:16 and 4:7. Persons of either sex can be inclined to desire an individualistic independence from a spouse of the other sex. Taken as whole, the Genesis creation narratives shatter this dream by exposing the interdependence, even in their contrasted subjectivities, of married women and men. For those in any age or culture, this is either a natural bridge or an irremovable obstacle to biblical understandings of human sexual differentiation. On another thread, this prompted discussion of these two verses.

The first chapters of Genesis are creation narrative, not quite law, advice, or aspiration, and their priority in the canon is just chronological but cognitive. Before we can venture deeply enough into torah to look for any of those things, we must first know something about existence in communion with God among the orders of his creation. 

In 2:19-20, we all recognise that Adam's naming of the animals as God brings them to him is a sign of his cognitive and physical mastery over them. Yet when Adam names the woman ishah in 2:23 and Eve in 3:20, he is simply following God's acts in 2:20 and 3:16. This is altogether different. In communion with God, man's responsibility for woman is woven into an order that is stronger than either of them, and far less arbitrary than some wish and others fear.

For those able to cross the bridge, a question opens as they survey the terrain on the other end-- What motivates this narrative's insistence on the interdependence of the sexes? Seeing Eve, formed not of dust, but of Adam's rib, the same question opens in another way-- why isn't the narrative clearer about whether Adam and Eve are two distinct ideas in the mind of God or a single androgynous creature improved by division into two? Is this actually an ambiguity in the text or its deepest statement on the nature of the sexes? Both sages of the Babylonian talmud and fathers of the Church (e.g. Basil of Ancyra) wrestled with this question.

In the 12th C West, Rabbi Abraham ben David of Posquières (usually cited as RABaD, RABaD III, or simply as "the Raavad"), the great antagonist of Maimonides, argued that Eve's creation from Adam's rib shows that hesed-- a capability for giving to another grounded in intimacy and identification with his or her needs-- is the natural attitude of spouses toward each other, since the other is indeed a part of oneself.

If a man and woman can be so deeply related by origin, then why are they so different? Is it simply the same as any two autonomous wills striving on a bit of turf? Not to the 3rd C  Bereshit Rabbah, which at 18:2 finds another significance in God's decision to fashion Eve from the interior of Adam: woman is free to maximise interiority itself, the trait of tzniut, to a degree that man's life, as Genesis describes it, will not allow. Conversely, the greatest victories of men in the Hebrew Bible come through inner stuggles of tzniut seen by God alone. The coincidentia oppositorum in the emotional dynamics that so many couples experience thus yields a dyad that is stronger than either spouse alone. Indeed, this 'drash compiled from the words of men (and a few women) is elsewhere quite funny in describing the ways in which a man's strength of purpose can depend entirely on the woman he weds. When Barack Obama describes his wife Michele as "my rock," he is admitting what many a man who is successful in public life says about the woman who completes him.

Of course, this post does not consider any of the Bible after its first four chapters. And there are also distinctly Christian notes to this synergy that could be mentioned, both from scripture and from tradition. For example, one could do worse than to look closely at the dense symbolism of the Dance of Isaiah mentioned in the footnote to my post on Graham Kings's Icons: An Evangelical Anglican Perspective. But all of it-- crowns, a circle dance led by a priest, newlyweds following the cross as a choirs sings of martyrdom-- begins in the beginning of all things.
 

Repetition, Chaos, Reset, and New Creation. Before leaving the threads on sexuality for the time being (apart from Phil's word studies), four simple points are worth making, about the whole collection of threads related, directly or indirectly, to the differentiation of the sexes.

(1)  After the gospel itself, taken at its widest scope, the way the Church collectively understands and lives the differentiation of the sexes is probably its most consequential witness. In fact, there are settings in which evangelism and discipleship that does not get this right will not get much of anything right. This is true quite apart from the controversies about it that bubble up here and there, and notwithstanding the fact that we are often quite passionately and irreformably stuck in our private understandings of it.

(2) Thankfully, much of the Church's actual witness is supporting lives well-lived, and gratitude is the frame of mind in which we should approach all of this. What churches do well, they do by Repetition of what has worked well in the past. However, Repetition without contemporary confession is increasingly a confusing witness, which makes it is harder for ordinary people to relate their given sexuality to the gospel. How the individual believer is to understand what connects "Jesus is Lord!" to the myriad details of life that are governed by sex is not clear, and at least in a general way it should be. This fuzziness in the mind is at both ends of the association. For example, the  theological incoherence that we saw in the threads on That Topic goes deeper than the narrow topic engaged and is something other than a simple dispute about scriptural authority or hermeneutics.

(3) Whilst one could see (1) and (2) from many points of view, this problem of the differentiation of the sexes is urgent in a theology that lays more stress on the Church as a people who anticipate in their lives now a New Creation wrought by God. The Old Perspective on Paul, as we might call it, has often been understood as making the individual conscience the arena within which the most important consequences of moral choice were played out in a psychomachy that was the dialectic of law and gospel. By implication, the wider and material consequences of our actions, though never denied, easily drifted to a distant background. That oversimplifies a lot, of course, but it does explain how Protestant churches were able to treat the orders of creation as a lesser concern for so long, why their values were so individualised that they inevitably secularised into libertarian deformations, and why academics have struggled through the last hundred years to clarify the principles of Protestant moral theology. However, if we agree with the New Perspective on Paul, especially as developed by Tom Wright, we cannot abuse the individual conscience as a dodge to ignore the wider concerns neglected in the past, and must instead explore a rather large territory known only in some very old maps and travellers' tales. Wright himself has been the first to scout it out, and others must move in to explore, survey, and cultivate it. The differentiation of the sexes is in that domain.

(4) To the fog of (2), there have been two main social responses-- acquiescence in Chaos, and determination to Reset-- and neither will work for us. Acquiescence in Chaos is practically the rejection of Christian hope as most of us in the village understand it. It is not true that the choices we make in our lives have no importance to Christ apart from what our consciences do with them. But Reset, the urge to just enforce harder an ideal order from the past, fails to give adequate weight to the scriptural evidence that a new status for women was integral to the reign of God as the apostles understood and lived it. Some of the change that has happened is God's revealed will. And Reset begs the question why God created time, if all that we are to do with our lives is sit in a cinema and watch the one golden movie over and over and over. God appears to like change better than many of us do. So whilst aspects of the witness that God means for the Church to have and to be should be informed by what we admire in past centuries, the task of discerning a better witness to New Creation has been entrusted to us.

So, Roger, you are writing again! I was worried that you were not well, but will instead look forward to buying your book.

Bowman and friends, I haven't deserted you all!  I'm sorry I haven't contributed for a while but I'm tackling a new book and am somewhat saturated with other matters.  Even so, I hope to post from time to time in the coming months.

"Fun," "play," and "art" are not often reckoned to be first topics in ecclesiology, but Stephen's intriguing essay on church camps has made a brief discussion of it in this thread timely. For simplicity, I will start with St Paul's list of virtues in Galatians 5:22 and 23, digress into neuropsychology, and then return to Stephen's camp essay.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Most readers of the scriptures will see the relevance of these human emotions* to Christian faith without further comment. Those who are following the general idea of this thread will have have gathered that, in an ecclesiology influenced by the New Perspective on Paul, human emotions related to God's creativity will have a special importance. Whilst it is obvious that these virtues are roughly the opposite of the vices in the adjacent sin list, it is useful to reflect that the two lists reflect opposite attitudes to God's governance of the creation and also tend to fall at opposite poles of most classifications of the emotions. The virtues are associated with "positive" emotions, whilst the vices are associated with "negative" emotions.

This contrast has a neurological correlate. (Yes, this is still the Fulcrum forum ;-) Physiologically, the Pauline virtues are rather more characteristic of human brains than the Pauline vices. Only humans have the distinctive "middle"** neocortical nuclei on which the virtues are dependent, and the long process of human brain development is largely the establishment of the "happier" left hemispheres' dominance over the "anxious" right hemisphere (e.g. children eventually learn not to involuntarily fear the dark). In contrast, the Pauline vices mostly reflect the physiology of less developed animals, and tellingly, relate emotions to actions.

This contrast also correlates to something we feel. Unless they are carefully cultivated, we often experience the emotions associated with the Pauline virtues as weaker, less compelling than the emotions associated with the Pauline vices. Moreover, unlike the darker emotions, they have no associated programs of action. This leads to a natural question-- how and why did human beings come to have these higher emotions at all?

For neuropsychologists at least, Barbara Fredrickson answered this question with her theory that child's play is the way in which human beings cultivate the positive emotions, even without a specific action to practise for each one. Play thus becomes the activity in which the distinctively human possibilities of ethical action emerge. Play does not of course ensure that persons will have "good character," but it does enable the physiological development without which good character would be impossible.*** Since Christians care about good character, they should care about child's play, and beyond that, about all the civilised forms of play, such as the arts and mathematics, that have evolved to extend these human capabilities. They should also note the freedom associated with this development, which contrasts, even neurologically, with the cognitive effects of the passions of St Paul's sin list. "Fun" is the motivation for much of human moral development.

So perhaps we are now ready to pay proper respect to the spontaneous desire of evangelicals to round up groups of children in utopian societies of their own devoted to-- Jesus and fun. When Stephen refers to this as "modelling the new creation" this is not a stretch at all. In any perspective informed by St Paul's sources in the wisdom tradition, it is very Pauline indeed to form a domestic world for the cultivation of the fruit of the Spirit. In a New Perspective, the development of character is a concern of the Church, and its aim is to enable Christians to participate, albeit proleptically, in the New Creation.

Stephen speculates that the camp experiences of evangelicals accounts for the high proportion of evangelical vocations to Holy Orders. That is certainly worth studying empirically. Here, I will note only that this implicitly relates the emotional dispositions formed in camps to the sense of self. Reflection on that another day.

* * *

I pray that the Voice from the whirlwind, expected to answer Job and his friends tonight, approves the change of plan.

* * *

Alexander Schmemann, whose journal I've quoted in a few places is best known to American clergy for his books on liturgics. His introduction to sacramentology in a secular society, For the Life of the World, has long appeared even on Baptist seminary syllabi. If you haven't read it, you've missed something.

_________

* I am using "emotions" here as in the experimental psychology of emotions. This usage is tied to such data as the existence of involuntary responses to facial expressions, and so differs from some philosophical and theological definitions of these emotions, which are nevertheless not without interest.

** By "middle" I do not mean "medial" as neuroanatomists use the term. The "middle" nuclei are the ones you would be bashing into a windscreen in an auto accident, if your airbag fails. The functions of these nuclei are related to executive function, affect, and interpersonal relations. Damage to a mother's "middle" nuclei is a tragic event for her children's development. The "medial" nuclei are below and behind them.

*** How do we know this? By submitting ethical problems to persons with lesions in the brain that have destroyed these capabilities. Patients who have lost their ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), for example, turn out to be remorseless utilitarians who would  push a plump man in front of a train to stop it, if doing so will save two or more lives down the tracks. "Why should I feel sorry? There was one of him and two of them. It's obvious." The classic case is that of Phineas Gage who accidentally blasted the tamping iron through his skull-- I pass them both every morning-- thus obliterating his VMPFC and changing in an instant from a disciplined Methodist into an impulsive and irascible gambler.

[Authentic] religion is always a transfer to another dimension, another level, and is therefore the annihilation of problems, not their solution.

That's my point, put in a setting of contemporary understanding of meaning. The function of religion is to have a good death. You still die, but you come to terms with transience.

Eternal life is not what begins after temporal life; it is the eternal presence of the totality of life.

There is no point in converting people to Christ if they do not convert their vision of the world and of life, since Christ then becomes merely a symbol for all that we love and want already—without Him.

Who invented the idea that religion is the resolution of problems? [Authentic] religion is always a transfer to another dimension, another level, and is therefore the annihilation of problems, not their solution. Problems also come from the Devil, who filled religion with his fuss and vulgarity—thus religion became a problem in the modern world.

Alexander Schmemann, Journal