Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > Delivered from the Elements of the World: Atonement, Justification, Mission > Status Update

Chapter 3: Among Gentiles

A fun, fictional Jewish "travelogue" where a young Israelite travels around the ancient world. Leithart uses it to illustrate just how enslaved the peoples were (both Jew and Gentile) to the "elements of the world" (the law boundaries demarcating the pure from the impure, the holy from the profane, "touch not, taste not, do not"). How these various stoicheia (purity, temple, sacrifice), whether invented by man/demons (Gentiles) or given by God (Jews), marked out the contours of reality (nature) itself and ceaselessly regulated every aspect of life with the threat of divine punishment, societal collapse, or even cataclysmic cosmic unraveling for transgression.

"Created to be lord of all, to share in the Creator's creative rule over creation, Adam would one day be elevated to kingship. At the moment of his birth from earth and breath, he was a trainee, a servant in the Lord's garden, his earthly dwelling place, the original sanctuary. It was a place of festivity: Adam could eat from the tree of life, communing in life with his Father. He could not, however, eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree of judgment that signified his eventual entrance into mature kingly wisdom. At the beginning, Adam was placed under the elements, hypo ta stoicheia tou kosmou, and "Taste not, touch not" was the first lesson of his pedagogy. "Taste not, touch not" was the first human ethics, the first human religious practice. It was a fundamental element in the socioreligious physics of the original creation. Adam and Eve were created as flesh—limited, weak, vulnerable, touchable, woundable. That was good, very good. They might have accepted their vulnerability and the precariousness of their fleshly life, trusting the Father to care for them. Adam might have been content to wait for the Lord to open his hand to satisfy his desires, might have trusted his Father to give him his full inheritance when the Father saw that he was ready. Eve might have rejoiced in fleshly weakness and trusted her Father to supply whatever strength she needed. Instead, they were discontented and impatient. Created good, very good flesh, they wanted to be more, and they wanted to be something more NOW. They ate the fruit on the promise that it would enable them to transcend fleshly weakness and limitations so they could be as God."

"After Adam's expulsion from the garden, holy space became taboo, inaccessible space. Yahweh stationed cherubim at the gate of the garden to guard against every attempt at reentry. From Adam on, if anyone wanted to enter the presence of God, he would have to pass through the sword and fire of the cherubim. No man could return to feast in the presence of God unless he first died. Yahweh performed the first sacrifice by providing animal skins for Adam and Eve, and from that point on no one could approach God's presence unless he were clothed in an animal. He could return to life, feasting and the presence of God only by passing through death. Salvation would mean the reversal of this fallen condition. Salvation would bring readmission to eat and drink in Goďs presence. Salvation would involve deliverance from mortal flesh, and from the taboos and exclusions that resulted from it. Anyone who could achieve that would be the Savior of Adam's race."

Flesh (sarx) is a multidimensional word:

1.) It can refer to the musculature, the layer between skin and bone (the "meat").

2.) It can refer to male genitalia (Lev 15; Rom 2:28), the target of circumcision, the cut of the covenant.

3.) As a symbol of procreation, it can describe genealogy and family heritage (Rom 1:3; 4:1; 9:3, 5). In this context, flesh is kin (Gen 29:15; Jud 9:2; 2 Sam 5:1).

4.) In this regard, flesh can also represent culture (Phil 3:5-6; i.e., one can be an Israelite "in the flesh" without necessarily being directly descended from Abraham).

5.) Flesh can be a metonymy for the fallen human condition marked by mortality, weakness, and shame (1 Cor 15:39-49).

"The dialectic of fleshly weakness and fleshly prowess is not as paradoxical as it might appear. Vulnerability to loss, lack, death and damage leads to fear, and fear produces protectiveness, protectiveness produces violence and aggression. Weakness is the source of boastful displays of strength and viriity, Those who live in the fear of death—in fleshly weakness—are thus prone not only to feelings of insecurity, low self-esteem, obsessions, perfectionism but also to ambitiousness, envy, narcissism, jealousy, rivalry, competi- tiveness, self-consciousness, guilt, and shame. Insofar as it is mortal and vulnerable, flesh desires pleasure and avoids pain. It can express itself in desire for luxuries and wealth, in greed and all the cruelty that greed produces. It can express itself in a desire for power and dominance; it is the source of libido dominandi... In a more specific Levitical sense, sexual prowess is a display of the power of flesh, a compensation for mortality."

"Flesh is good. Even mortal flesh is not evil in itself. Flesh becomes a motivator of sin and evil when human beings seek to compensate for finitude, mortality, weakness, when they refuse to accept their vulnerability and trust their Creator for all good gifts. Sin and evil are human attempts to compensate for having, for being, mortal flesh."

"If the Creator is going to fulfill his purposes for his creation, he will have to destroy flesh. Just so: Genesis records the beginning of Yahwehs centuries-long war against flesh, institutionalized in the stoicheic system that imposes an antisarkic pedagogy on his people. The mind set on flesh is at war with the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh. Human beings can live as God intended only if flesh is put to death. In opposing flesh, Yahweh is not opposing humanity. He is acting to deliver humanity from everything that makes it bestial, every attempt to become more than human that makes humanity inhuman. In his war against flesh, Yahweh is at war with pride, heroic bravado, violence, the cascade of reciprocal vengeance, against Adam's impatience and Cain's envy and Lamechs brutality and the lusts of the sons of God for the daughters of men. In seeking to kill flesh to save the human race, Yahweh ultimately aims to prosecute, condemn and execute mortality, to put death to death."

Yahweh sends the Flood against "flesh" (Gen 6-7), and yet mankind is still flesh (8:21).

After the division of humanity at Babel, God selected Abram and gave him the covenant of circumcision, a cutting off of flesh (Gen 17).

"If circumcision is a renunciation of flesh, it is also a renunciation of ethnic separation and division. Circumcision separated Israel, but the character of that division needs to be carefully specified. God's judgment against Babel, not God's command of circumcision, created the divided world. Circumcision was given in the context of Babel, but it was not a Babelic, that is, a fleshly marker. On the contrary, it was a renunciation of the fleshly patterns of division, rivalry, competition, strife that characterized the world after Babel. Circumcision was anti-Babel, signifying the promise that Yahweh would bless all nations through Abraham. Circumcision is a division, but it marked a division from division, a separation from the rivalrous project of scattering and domination that characterizes the nations, a negation of the negation and a death to the death that is fleshly existence. This is why circumcision itself can be seen as a type of Jesus' cross, what Paul calls "the circumcision of Christ": in his death, Jesus decisively cut off flesh (Col 2:11)."

"Circumcision was a casting-away of flesh that began in infancy. Sexual potency and procreation are paths to immortality, two of flesh's main strategies for overcoming the fear of death. A cut in the flesh of the foreskin, a cut in the male organ of generation, is a counterattack on the flesh's strategies of flesh-avoidance, its tactics of death-denial. Circumcision brought an end to the reign of the phallus by symbolically cutting off the phallus: there is not much room left for phallic display when there is no phallus to display. Circumcision was the beginning of the overthrow of the fear of death because it imposed a fleshly death at the beginning of life."

"Circumcision was the first stoicheion of Israelite social life, and it set the trajectory for the Torah that was later added to the promise. When the full stoicheic system was established at Sinai, it institutionalized Yahweh's anti-sarkic program for his people and advanced the cause of his saving war against enslaving flesh."