David didn’t do his homework presciently? 
”I love you, LORD, my strength.”
Psalm 18:1
A huge paradigm shift.
That Hebrew word is repeatedly used to refer to God, see all the references I provided. It feels like you keep skipping over this fact.
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Sorry… I wasn’t careful enough in reading Christy’s and Dale’s responses and jumped to the wrong conclusions.
I also disputed this claim of his about seeing God as a father. On the other hand, I think there was a bit of a shift in Jesus’ view of the nature of the father-son relationship between God and man, at least from how it had become in Jesus’ time. The Jewish focus was a little more on obedience (to the point of legalism) and duty, while the focus of Jesus was more on love, freedom, and even joy. It was particularly Jesus’ willingness to associate with sinners which was a little shocking, while the rabbis of the time took great pains to seek purity by not associating with those considered impure. It was a Jewish rabbi who told me this, BTW. He was a teacher of a class on messianic movements and it was leading to his thesis that Hassidic Judaism followed a similar idea. Thus he basically proposed that Jesus was the first Hasidic Tzadik (many of which also had miracles attributed to them).
For some time I have thought that the rabbinic or Pharisee movement bore some similarity to Protestantism in its emphasis on studying the scriptures. Now I wonder if the Hassidic movement might likewise be considered similar to the Christian evangelical movement.
There is no pantheon portrayed in the Bible: from Genesis 1 onward it is made clear that the other elohim are created beings made by Yahweh-Elohim to serve Him, but that they rebelled and went off to do their own thing.
Having read most of the Old Testament in the Hebrew I call that nonsense: the primary theme of the scriptures of the old covenant has been summed up in the single Hebrew word חֶסֶד (khe-sed), which is rendered as “lovingkindness”, “steadfast love”, “Faithful love”, “gracious love”, and similar terms, and the prophets refer to Yahweh as the father of Israel as well as the Father of all people. Then there’s this–
Sure, by pseudo-scholars who have imbibed the murky mysticism of people like J G Frazer.
People get stuck on the “bloody history” and miss the loving Father God of the Psalms and the Prophets. I think it’s part of the attitude that treats the Old Testament writings as a sort of list of equal items rather than seeing the progression it really is where the prophets are in essence authorized interpreters of the Torah and the Psalms are outpourings of responses to the Father and His love.
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- You mean like the people who say that Christians were responsible for antisemitism and the Holocaust?
Sorry, but no: “Abba” was just the Aramaic word for “father” as used everywhere Aramaic was spoken, and was used for God in Psalm 68 and elsewhere in the Aramaic (the Hebrew uses אֲבִ֣י, [ah-vee] which is the ancestor to the Aramaic word). There’s also evidence that “Abba, Father”, where “Father” is the Greek πατήρ, was an expression already in some use among Hellenistic Jews and which blossomed in Christian use since it bridged between the two parts of humanity as Paul wrote, “Jews and Greeks” and suggested a unity of Jewish and Gentile believers. Jesus would have grown up using “abba” for Joseph as well as for God the Father.
And we don’t know that He used it for God regularly; there’s only one recorded use and that was in an extreme situation of intimacy in private, so using a word that occurs only once in the Gospels and twice in Paul’s letters to indicate a “paradigm shift” is a proposition resting on faulty ground.
In fact while Joachim Jeremias may have championed the idea that it almost means “Daddy”, most of the claims that Abba was a “term of endearment” come from looking at use of the word in modern Hebrew. In truth, in the first century B.C. and A.D. the most significant aspect of its use was in the context of households with slaves and servants: only the actual family of the head of that family used “Abba” to refer to the family head; the rest had to use Κύριε (ki-ree-eh), meaning somewhere between “sir” and “lord”.
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No, I mean the Old Testament.
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I do agree that the Biblical understanding of divinity is more complicated than it is sometimes depicted today. For one thing, the ancient Hebrews were clearly more henotheists (believing only one deity is worthy of worship) than they were true monotheists. True Jewish monotheism doesn’t seem to become apparent until after the fall of Jerusalem. Personally, I do not find that too troubling since I don’t think there is a reason that God needs to fit neatly into our modern categories of divinity. The concept of “gods” may very well be a concept that humans invented which God co-opted to reveal himself to humans. The ancient Israelites probably did believe that Yahweh presided over a divine assembly of deities but believed that only Yahweh was worthy of being worshiped. The other deities were probably more on the level of angels, responsible for running different aspects of creation under Yahweh’s rule. On the other hand, I think this passage is a reflection of the problem that a lot of modern readers of the Biblical text have with seeing the Bible as being both a human book that reflects its cultural and historical context and a divine book that God has used to draw humanity to himself. Some people, typically more theologically conservative Christians, want to see it as just a divine book that fell out of the sky into their hands yesterday. Others, like those in higher critical Biblical scholarship, want to only see it as a human book that has a lot to tell us about Jewish history and mythology but little if anything about God. The thing is that there is no reason why it cannot be both. In fact, it is probably the more reasonable scenario considering the complexity of Biblical literature. Although there are parts of the Bible that are hard to understand, there are other parts of the Bible that most of us would like to be true, like God caring about justice for the poor or God intending to renew all creation.
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As one of my grad school professors loved to say, “The Bible is more than thoroughly human literature – but it is never less than that.” Another professor loved to respond, “The Bible is more than just revelatory literature, but it is never less than that”.
I think that gets the balance right!
Weren’t we talking about the Lord’s Prayer as the context for this alleged paradigm shift? Jesus publicly taught people to pray “Our Father in Heaven”
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I was referring to the claim that “Abba” for God the Father indicated a paradigm shift as is often claimed erroneously (and justified badly) which seemed to be the line Rob was pursuing.
Okay, let me cut to the bone. Either Jesus was using a term of endearment or not, but the Hebrew ‘av’ that I followed up with and the command not to take the name of God in vain collectively made the Jews more formal in their approaching God. Jesus, according to the Gospel, encouraged an informal, unpretentious, but contrite heart in approaching God, and contradicted the formalised practise of his day on so many occasions.
We also can’t ignore that the New Testament is rife for historical-critical enquiry, starting with the supernatural interpretation of Jesus, which for me is Paul and his influence at work, and the resurrection itself is a question of whether Jesus was singularly ‘the’ son of God, or ‘a’ son of God, who led his followers into a new covenant to realise their status. It has always been a question for me as to when the church started leaving the wandering preacher who suffered persecution and execution in favour of a divine being in heaven siting to the right of the father. It increasingly seems to me to begin with Paul who tried to appease the Romans – or later redaction did that work.
The Sermon on the Mount, if you take it for itself, even though it attempts to portray Jesus as another Moses to some degree, has a teaching that is hard to reconcile with the teaching of Paul, unless you teach it apocalyptically. Without the apocalyptic perspective, it is recognised by many other traditions as a universal wisdom tradition, which in many parts contradicts the policies of the later church. With the apocalyptic perspective, the fulfilment of which is by Paul a matter of in his lifetime, Jesus and Paul were just downright wrong. You have that choice.
On the point of revelation, or enlightenment, or vision, once you adopt the informal, unpretentious, but contrite heart in approaching the sacred, it is hard to distinguish between what is or not sacred. The shock realisation I experienced in my first years in Christianity, and which I apparently caused with my teaching in the past, I also experienced with the mystics of Christianity as well as other traditions - and even contemporary poetry can have the same effect. Various experiences with nature have caused a similar emotion, which for me is caused by realising that God is in all of creation. It is a state of mind, without which I admit you do not experience such emotion, but adopting in this regard what the Buddhists call a “beginners mind” and Jesus called being “like a child,” the recognition of the mystics that God is nearer than anything else comes to one in contemplation and meditation, but also in everyday events. The wonderous Matth.6:26-33 speaks so clearly:
“Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore, do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
For this, we need no supernatural events or people, we need a reverence for the sacred in reality.
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To be quite honest, the idea of a divine book that fell out of the sky is no better than Greek mythology. Regardless of what people thought previously, our concept of history has changed, and we see historical developments more clearly as processes which interact with each other, and humanity as going through stages of awareness, as Owen Barfield said, starting with what he called ‘immediate participation’ in a cosmic drama. At this stage, we find all across the very early traditions this dramatic portrayal of things we would portray very different today, and it was a stage out of which Abram emerged, but also going through a henotheistic phase on the way to monotheism.
The fact that the big changes were going on in the perceptions of the people writing and redacting the scriptural sources seems to evade our awareness. The scriptural evidence reveals the developments in understanding what is the foundational source of existence and is as such a wonderful documentation of how we came to leave the god’s and idols behind and realise finally that God is in which “we live and move and have our being.” At some point, we somehow returned to material idolatry – and probably every generation must be freed from that.
This doesn’t make sense. Jesus used the Aramaic for father and the Jews before him used the Hebrew for father. They are etymologically related words. How in the world does this make the Jews more formal. It was YHWH that they were careful about using, but that was a later development that related to reading the text.
At the end of the day, you can pick who is your authority, mystics or Bible scholars. But it’s not going to be convincing to cite mystics to Bible scholars when the mystics are contradicting basic facts of Bible scholarship.
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You’re being silly if you think Jesus in that wondrous passage doesn’t clearly include the supernatural in ‘what is sacred in reality’. We need, and some of us know we have, a real heavenly Father to trust in and who is trustworthy.
Here’s something to wonder about, speaking of wondrous – what did Jesus mean when he warned “Watch and beware the yeast”?
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