St Jerome. 30 September 2021.

Now here's a hell of a guy.

Let's start where I started, long ago in a galaxy far far away -- by which I mean, the preconciliar Roman Catholic Church.  There's been lots of councils to be pre- to, here and now it means the last one, pre-Vatican II.

The Jerome Of My Younger Days.

Here's what I recall from those days. We used an official Bible in Latin, and our English versions were made from the Latin, and that Latin Bible was the Latin translation of St Jerome, often called the Vulgate. Vulgate?  What's that, looks like vulgar, something dirty in it?  No, the name comes from the Latin word for ordinary people, vulgus, since the translation was into the language of ordinary people there and then, Latin. Protestants didn't use the Vulgate. They had the King James Bible, translated from Hebrew and Greek, not translated from a translation into Latin, therefore, they claimed, more accurate.

Not so, we were told, or at least I remember being told. St Jerome, for one thing, was a saint, a term not at least as yet applicable to modern Biblical scholars. And, he was much closer in time to the Biblical, particularly the New Testament, authors, which meant his understanding of the languages was more immediate and not from scholarly studies centuries later. And also, he worked from better sources than we have, including texts that no longer exist. Therefore, in using Jerome's Latin Bible, we are using a source altogether more trustworthy than the much later sources and scholarship of the Protestant Bible translations.

The Historical Jerome versus The Jerome Of Faith.

What's ironic is, while famous in our day for translating the Bible into the dominant language of the people of his place and time, in his own day Jerome was highly controversial not for translating but for the text from which he translated.  He used the Hebrew text of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, but the Jewish translation into Greek called the Septuagint was considered the normative and inspired text for centuries, going back to the Greek-speaking early church.  The New Testament quotes the Old Testament from the Greek, and its longer canon (list of books) was the basis for the Old Testament canon.

We still have echoes of that controversy now, the so-called Apocrypha.  The Septuagint has books and parts of books in it that the Hebrew Bible doesn't.  Bibles of Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox origin retain the use of the Septuagint as the basis of their Old Testament, Bibles of Protestant origin use the Hebrew Canon.  Nobody put anything in or took anything out, they just use different but related sources.  The Septuagint was accepted by the proverbial "early church" and Jerome was going against the grain to favour the Hebrew canon and text rather than the Greek.

Even so, the books in dispute were not rejected altogether, but placed in between an OT of the 39 books of the Hebrew Bible and the 27 of the NT, and given the name Apocrypha, from the Latin aprocryphus which transliterated the Greek apokruphos, which means obscure or hidden.  In this context, obscure was not about being "lost books" or anything, it was about their canonicity and use for doctrine.  Those who accept their canonicity call them deuterocanonical, from the Greek for second canon, meaning added later to the canon.  But in neither case, not Jerome, not Luther, not the King James Version, were they discarded altogether and not published, as has been the innovation in recent times of non-Catholic Bibles.

Another enduring echo of that controversy is that while the Hebrew Bible is arranged in three distinct parts, namely Law, Prophets and Writings, the Septuagint is not, and though many Bibles now use the Hebrew Bible as the OT, the book order has the Prophets and Writings mixed to-gether as in the Septuagint rather than retaining the three-part division of the Hebrew Bible.

Actually though, Jerome was controversial for a hell of a lot more than that and was run out of Rome!  Holy crap, people jumped all over Jimmy Swaggart for getting caught with a prostitute, but that ain't nuttin compared to Jerome's story. Here it is.

Jerome was born a pagan in a town called Stridon, which was in the Roman territory called Dalmatia.   The town no longer exists because the Goths trashed it in 379, and no-body knows exactly where it was, except that it was in Dalmatia, which was more or less modern Croatia and Bosnia and Slovenia.  As a young man he went to Rome to pursue classical education, and by his own account pursue the various extra-curricular activities often found in student life then as now. Somewhere along the line he converted to Christianity and was baptised.

After some years in Rome he set out for France, well, Gaul then, and ended up in Trier, which is about the most magnificent and enchanting place it has been my good fortune to visit, ever, anywhere. But I digress.  Here in this most wonderful place he seems to have taken up theology. Then about 373 or so he sets out for what is now called the Middle East, particularly Antioch, in what is now Turkey and one of the oldest centres of Christianity. It was there that he came to give up secular learning altogether and focus on the Bible, learning Hebrew from Jewish Christians, and, apparently seized with remorse for his past behaviour, got into all sorts of ascetic penitential practices. Always a danger -- the Good News just isn't good enough or news enough, gotta have works!

The Ladies' Ear Tickler Enters the Story.

But in 382 he goes back to Rome again, this time as assistant to Pope Damasus I. Now there's another hell of a guy. Man, papal elections just ain't what they used to be.  Once upon a time, they were a matter of the clergy and people of the area choosing a bishop, or overseer, with overseers from nearby areas confirming it. But by this time we have Constantine, and Christianity attaining respectable state-recognised status, and now the Emperor confirmed newly elected bishops. That's helpful, sorta, because sometimes more than one guy claimed to be elected, sometimes in more than one election!

So when Pope Liberius, whom the Emperor Constantine had thrown out of Rome, died on 24 September 366, one faction supported Ursinus, the previous pope's deacon, while another, which had previously supported a rival pope, Felix II, supported Damasus. The patrician class, the old noble families of Rome, supported Damasus, but the plebian class, the regular folks, and the deacons supported Ursinus. Each was elected, in separate elections. Some real "apostolic succession" there, oh yeah.

It gets worse. There was outright rioting between supporters of the two, each side killing the other, so bad that the prefects of the city had to be called on to restore order. Damasus got formally recognised, and then his supporters commenced a slaughter of 137 of Unsinus' supporters, right in a church. Damasus was accused of murder, and hauled up on charges before a later prefect, but, being the favourite of the wealthy class, they bought the support of the Emperor and got Damasus off. He was known as Auriscalpius Matronarum, the ladies' ear scratcher.

Damasus was "pope" from 366 until he died on 11 December 384. During which time, we have to remember to really get what was going on here, the Emperors East and West made the church as headed by Damasus in Rome, and Peter in Antioch, the official state church and the one recognised as "catholic", in the Edict of Thessalonica on 27 February 380, the birthday of the Catholic Church, as distinct from the catholic church. It was during Damasus' papacy that the Emperor Gratian, one of the signatories to the Edict of Thessalonica, refused the traditional title of pontifex maximus, the chief priest of traditional Roman religion, and the title then became associated with the bishop of Rome as the chief priest of the new Roman state religion. In sum, this is the era of the beginning of the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (Babylon of course being a figure for Rome).

Back to the Historical Jerome.

So in 382, when Damasus calls Jerome back to Rome to help him shape things up, what was being shaped up was the two-year-old Catholic Church, the new official state religion, which by Imperial edict was the only church entitled to the description "catholic"  (whole, complete, entire, universal), or even the name "church".  All others were defined as truly demented and insane, heretics and, since God's gonna kick their butt, deserving of such punishment as the Empire should choose to inflict.

What, Past Elder up to his usual Catholic bashing?  No, it's what the text says -- Hanc legem sequentes Christianorum catholicorum nomen iubemus amplecti, reliquos vero dementes vesanosque iudicantes haeretici dogmatis infamiam sustinere 'nec conciliabula eorum ecclesiarum nomen accipere', divina primum vindicta post etiam motus nostri quem ex caelesti arbitro sumpserimus ultione plectendos.  The Western Roman Empire at this time was starting to fall apart and was just decades away from totally falling apart, so a lot of this had to do with trying to prevent that.

Jerome was no slouch at matronly ear tickling himself, and once back in Rome soon had a little group of wealthy patrician widows around him, whose money supported him, a Paula in particular. And he had this ascetic works-righteousness thing going, into which he got them all. Nothing like having lots of someone else's money to support you if you want a monastic ascetic life. Hell yes.

In fact, the daughter of Paula, a lively young woman named Blaesilla, after just four months of having to live this way, died of it! Yeah, died. On top of which Jerome tells Paula not to mourn her daughter. This got the Romans really upset, there was an inquiry into just what was really going on between Jerome and Paula, and then Damasus dies, and with that support gone, Jerome is forced out of Rome.

So where's he go? Where else, the Eastern Empire, where they really get into all this monkery and fasting and stuff. Paula and her money follow. The whole sham of a works-based sparse life funded by patrician wealthy-class money. There's some real apostolic stuff for you. Lemme tell ya, if somebody wants to convince you of their mistaking the physiological effects of self induced glucose denial for some sort of spiritual state of attainment, you'd be better off running right to the nearest McDonald's and ordering a double quarter pounder, which, if memory serves, is combo 4 on the menu.

Personally I like our Nebraska favourite Runza better, which also makes a helluva burger, and it's Wolgadeutsch too, but being a regional chain may not be available where you are.  But I digress.  Happens.  Part of the fun of reading Past Elder.  Back to the story.

This sort of stuff is not self-denial, it's life denial. Utterly pathological. It is no curb whatever to excess and greed, but is rather an equally odious extreme reaction to it, both extremes equally devoid of the Gospel altogether. It comes rather from an empire about to collapse under both the tension within, its classic past and Christian present and efforts to reconcile them with huge civil unrest in its wake, and threats from without, in the West. Which was bad enough, but in the East it did not collapse for another thousand years or so, and continued unabated, which is equally bad. The opposite of greed and excess is not this pathological repression, but Judas H Priest, just eat a normal balanced diet and go about a life of use to God and your fellow Man, stay in your parish where you find everything that made the saints saints, the Word, the Word preached, the Sacrament, and your fellow Christians.

The Word of the Lord Endures Forever -- Despite the "Church".

Well, it would also be about a thousand years or so until THAT message got out, something called the Lutheran Reformation, by a fellow survivor of the remnants of all this nonsense, guy named Martin Luther. Sorry if this stuff isn't in the sanitised reductive biographical sketches that turn up in treasuries of prayer and stuff like that, but them's the facts. It's a disgusting pagan mess, massacres, murders, politics, scandals and all, and from the time of Jerome's life on, was the official religion of the state, held to be right from the Apostles, which remained in the East, and remained in the West after it reconstituted itself as the Holy Roman Empire, and remains to this day in the former state churches that survive these empires.

This is the world of Augustine, Jerome, Damasus, etc -- the Western Roman Empire, which contains Rome, once the centre of the whole thing, in utter turmoil between its classic philosophy, art, culture and religion and the new religion, in attendant civil turmoil, and under assault from Germanic forces outside it. The sack of Rome came in 410, 24 August to be exact, by Alaric, King of the Visigoths. The efforts to synthesise Rome's past and present failed utterly to preserve Rome. But it created a state religion which survived the death of the state that created it, and became the one remaining link upon which the new state would be built, the Holy Roman Empire.  It survives to this day: in the West as the Roman Catholic Church as well as other once-Catholic state churches, some of them with the word Lutheran in them, most having now severed or softened the once-mandatory connexion to their modern states, and in the East as the various Eastern Orthodox churches.

And all of it based entirely on the characteristics of that age, not in the least on the Gospel, as a dying empire tried to redefine itself for survival -- hence "true" churches, "apostolic succession", "bishops" who were as well state officials and political powers, and all the other nonsense by which the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches try to justify themselves and their pagan accretions which would hold the catholic church in captivity until the Lutheran Reformation.  The need for such a reformation was so strong amid all this horse dung and bullroar that once it happened later "reforms" blew right past the Lutheran Reformation to an opposite but equally bad extreme, which to-day but not originally travels under the name Protestant or, in the US, Evangelical.

So we have a pope supported by the wealthy Roman class in their twilight who kills his opponents and becomes by edict of the Emperor the true recipient of the true faith, and a holy man whose "I'd better inflict all this on myself" asceticism is funded by more wealthy Roman class money, which kills the daughter of his main supporter and disgusts even the Romans.

So what do we do then, forget about all this as an unholy mess we can ignore and just get back to the Bible, the "New Testament" church? No. And hell no. Judas H Priest, the New Testament church did not have the New Testament as we have it, so how ya gonna do that? You ain't.

Because here's the thing, the Babylonian Captivity was just that, a captivity, not an extinction. The catholic church survived and continues to survive even the invention of the Catholic Church by the Roman Empire. And why is that? Because of the truth expressed in the motto of the Lutheran Reformation, which motto is simply Scripture itself, from both the New and Old Testament, specifically I Peter 1:25 which itself quotes Isaias 40:8.

VDMA. Verbum Domini manet in aeternum. The Word of the Lord endures forever. It cannot be overcome, and on its central truth about Jesus Christ is built the church against which the gates of hell itself cannot prevail, let alone the Roman Empire. It can survive power mongers like Damasus and pathological lunatics like Augustine and Jerome.

The Word of the Lord Endures Forever -- Despite Translators.

Particularly Jerome.  Even though it's the work of a nut case whose nuttiness was fatal and whose supposed self-denial was based on the wealth of others, Jerome's new Latin translation did do two major things.  1) It established a better text of the Bible in the most widely understood language of its time, which remained key in the availability of the Bible for centuries to come, as Latin became the language of learning.  2) It introduced to a thoroughly Gentilised Christianity, who had the barest of understanding of the Jewish faith that Christianity fulfills, and who had instead replaced such an understanding with reworkings in Christian dress of their own classic philosophy, a more Jewish understanding of the texts, admired to this day by Jews.  Not to mention the Hebrew itself.

Not only that, but Jerome set in motion a tradition of selections from Scripture for reading at the preaching part of the Divine Service which would continue for about 1,500 years, and still continues as what we now call the "historic" lectionary. And why is it "historic"?  Because it's, well, old, you know, historic?  Hell no. Because there's another one now, a product in the 1960s of part of the church still in Babylonian Captivity from its last council, Babylon II, er, Vatican II, and widely adapted by wannabes.

The Western Roman Empire, under its new Germanic leaders, managed after a few hundred years known as the Dark Ages to more or less reconstitute itself as the Holy Roman Empire, and the old state church of the old Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, was right there to take its place in the reconstituted Roman Empire. Some consider the HRE to have begun with the coronation -- by the "pope" of course -- of Charlemagne, Karl der Grosse, in 800, as Emperor of the Romans, and some consider it to have begun with the coronation -- by the "pope" of course -- of Otto on 2 February 962. But in any case it lasted for about another 1,000 years, and formally ended on 6 August 1806 at the hands of Napoleon.  The deposed last HRE, Francis II, however continued as Francis I, Emperor of Austria. That makes Francis (Franz actually) the only Doppelkaiser in history.  Huh?   Kaiser, that's a Germanisation of guess what, Caesar. Doppel is double.

But by about 100 years after that, the underpinnings of the Roman Catholic Church seemed even to many within it as wearing a bit thin, the Roman Empire being long gone and now the Holy Roman Empire being long gone too, and movements began in various circles, some Scriptural, some doctrinal, some liturgical, to re-express this whole deal in terms not so connected to things long gone.  So they set about coming up with something more attuned to the existentialism and phenomenology then all the rage.

A small example of that, but symptomatic of the large examples, is the Exultet prayer in the Easter Vigil liturgy.  It ends with a prayer for the Holy Roman Emperor, which although that part had not been said since the last HRE, Franz II mentioned above, quit in 1806, it was not removed from the Exultet until 1955 as part of Pope Pius XII's massive revision of the Holy Week liturgy.

The Word of the Lord Endures Forever -- Despite "the Church".  Again. 

So once again, just as in the time of Jerome, Augustine, Damasus, et al, we have an entity trying to preserve itself by merging its past with its present and future of a different origin. But this time, that past was itself exactly the product of what was once the different origin the last time around. IOW, both that church's Empires, Roman and Holy Roman, were gone and now their church had to go it alone in another emerging new world, and once again it sought to reinvent itself as a synthesis, hybrid, reconciliation, something like that, of the two. This culminated at Vatican II, when the old Imperial church reinvented itself for a new post-Imperial age.

Problem is, as we saw, the old Imperial church was just that, the old Imperial church, not the catholic church or the church of Jesus Christ, so one of the two elements being synthesised into the new synthesis was itself a previous synthesis of Christianity and the old empire. The proponents of this movement thought Christianity, the catholic church, the church of Jesus Christ, to be re-emerging after centuries of being obscured, jumping over centuries to before Constantine, but in fact it was being yet further obscured; the Babylonian Captivity in which they were still captive deepened, only re-expressed in terms of the new Babylon that no longer had it as its church, or had a church at all, so it seemed new.

We shall see in our next post, in an address by one of its architects and champions, this overriding essential idea of a reversal of corrupting influences since Constantine.  It sounds good, very good.  Almost sounds like us talking about the Babylonian Captivity!  It isn't.  Why?  For one thing, all its points were made, prior to the council and with no need for a council to be called, by Pope Pius XII, particularly in his encyclicals Mystici corporis Christi (The Mystical Body of Christ, 29 June 1943), Mediator Dei (Mediator of God, on liturgical reform, 20 November 1947) and Humani generis (Of the human race, 12 August 1950).

While RC apologists love to proclaim Vatican II as in harmony with these and bringing them to fruition, this is false.  As if that were not clear enough in the documents themselves, in which the things against which Pius warned as threats to and dissension from Catholicism became normative Catholicism, it is quite clear in the many theologians censured in the wake of these encyclicals (de Lubac, Congar et al.) who became the movers and shakers at Vatican II.

For another, the notion that before Constantine there was some sort of pure unified church from which we deviated and to which we can return is nothing more than a Romantic fiction akin to Rousseau's "noble savage".  This pure early church was in fact a bleeding mess, as is evident from St Paul's epistles through the Patristics (the "fathers"; theologians from roughly 100 to 450 or to 787, the year of the Second Council of Nicaea, the last council recognized by both the Eastern and Western Church).  One sees an amazing spectrum of widely divergent ideas of who Christ is and what Christianity is, which only appears pure and unified through the self-selective lens they think they are discarding of the very Trinitarian Christianity toward whose triumph over the others Constantine contributed.

For yet another, a body grows.  It is not the same at 70 years as it is at 7 years or 7 months, and if it has gotten off course in its later years, correction from that does not consist in returning to what it was in earlier years.  A 70 year old does not become a 7 year old again, discarding everything.  As regards the contributions of Jerome, a reform based on this is simply nothing more than the "exaggerated and senseless antiquarianism", which has since come to be called "liturgical archaeology", against which Pius XII warned (Mediator Dei 64) as he encouraged lay participation. 

In this way it only superficially resembled, with such things as vernacular languages and free standing altars, the real reformation of the church, which had happened nearly five centuries before!  They think they addressed what we did in the Babylonian Captivity but missed entirely the nature of what we did.  And so the Whore of Babylon thoroughly remodelled the brothel, with a new order of liturgy (yeah, literally, a novus ordo) complete with new calendar of observances and new lectionary of readings, replacing the one that had grown for centuries.

Now that's not surprising, that's what you do when you're the Whore of Babylon, and the Babylon that formed you and kept you as its whore is gone and there is a new Babylon.

But these "reforms" came about on an entirely different basis than the reforms of the Lutheran Reformation, which did not run from the march of history nor wish to discard or disparage it, for all its warts and blemishes, did not seek to reverse or jump back over centuries of development, as if the Holy Ghost took a nap for some 1,600 years, did not engage in liturgical archaeology, but instead accepted it and moved on, not reinventing anything but consciously maintaining continuity, as the Augsburg Confession takes great pains to point out, discarding only that which contradicted Scripture but otherwise retaining the ceremonies and readings previously in use.

The difference between, and essential incompatibility between, Lutheran liturgical reform and Catholic liturgical reform is more fully treated in our post for 25 June on the presentation of the Augsburg Confession.

What is surprising now is that the churches of the Reformation generally, and even those of the Lutheran Reformation, jumped on board with this Roman insanity, took the novus ordo and revised and reworked their own versions of it! So now we have an "historic" lectionary right alongside a Vatican II For Lutherans Lutheranised version of this novus ordo.  We even lead the Whore herself in this regard, because we didn't have to wait a generation or so for a Roman Imperial official with only the church of the former state left -- a "pope", in case you were wondering -- to say it's OK with a motu proprio! And then his immediate successor reverses it.  Utter madness.

Conclusion.

So on this feast of St Jerome, let us remember that, you know what, he really was closer to the authors and sources of the Bible than our vaunted modern scholars working removed by centuries, and really did, nut case and all, contribute to the church, which even he and his contemporaries and times and subsequent times could put in captivity but not extinction, a thing of great value in the Vulgate Bible and the tradition of the historic lectionary.

And let us remember that the Reformation has already happened and not at all on the basis that fuelled Babylon II, er, Vatican II.  We continue as the catholic church where the Word is rightly proclaimed and the Sacraments rightly administered, no new faith, no new doctrine, no new anything, and sure as hell no new orders of worship based on the scholarship emerging from the dissolution, not just politically but in every way, of the Holy Roman Empire, in which Roman effort there is no "hermeneutic of continuity" whatever but a pathetic old whore trying to still work the streets.  With us it is rather the organic continuity of the catholic church normed by its very own book, the Bible, rejecting only what contradicts it.

St Michael's Day / Michaelmas / Michaelistag 29 September 2021.

This was a pretty big day for centuries.  So why was that and why don't we hear much about it now?  That's what this post is about, and in finding out we'll see lots of ways the feast has impacted modern life.  

It's not completely lost.  It's still contained in our LCMS calendar. Phillip Melanchthon even wrote a poem for the day which became a hymn, "Lord God, To Thee We Give All Praise", which is "Dicimus grates tibi summe rerum" in his Latin original --  yes, Latin.  We still have that too.  It's hymn 254 in The Lutheran Hymnal, or, I suppose it won't hurt to say, 522 in LSB.

Here's why the big deal.  

Michael in the Bible.

Michael is one of the angels, and is mentioned by name in three books of the Bible, Daniel, Jude and Revelation aka the Apocalypse. His name means in Hebrew "Who is like God?"

In Daniel, Gabriel, another leading angel, tells Daniel that Michael is his helper in defending the Jews, wrt Daniel's prayer that the Jews be able to return to Jerusalem (Daniel 10).  That return (and much else) is covered earlier this month in the post Temples, Taxes, Vespasian and Now.  Later in the Book of Daniel (chapter 12) Michael is identified as he who stands up for "the sons of thy people", the Jews, who will do so in the final battle at the end of time. This is the only time Michael is mentioned by name in the Hebrew Bible.

It is not the only time he appears, depending on to whom you listen. Some say he is the "captain of the host of the Lord" in the Book of Josue, or Joshua, 5:13-15, but some say this cannot be since he accepted worship and only God can do that. So then some say the figure was actually a disguised appearance of God himself, and then some others say (like my historical-critical Scripture profs in college) that that is what "angels" are anyway, not separate beings but muted references to God himself, out of piety so Man can withstand the interaction.

Rabbinic tradition variously credits him with being the angel 1) who rescued Abraham from Nimrod's furnace, 2) who protected Sarah from being defiled as Abraham's sister as Abraham tried to protect her by calling his sister and not wife, 3) who told Sarah she would have a son, 4) who brought the ram provided by God for Abraham to substitute for that son Isaac in sacrifice, 5) who was the angel who wrestled with Jacob, 6) who was the angel who spoke to Moses in the burning bush and later taught Moses the Law, on and on, also including references in writings not in the Hebrew Bible such as protecting Adam and Eve after the Fall and teaching him how to farm.

This role of protector and defender was passed on to the early Christian church, among so much else in Judaism, and not just in these stories, he is mentioned twice in the New Testament.

In the Letter of Jude, verse 9, he argues with Satan over Moses' body, also a Jewish theme, keeping Moses' body hidden so reverence would be directed to God and not misplaced hero worship, something which crept into that church anyway as saint veneration and relics. In the Book of Revelation, or The Apocalypse, chapter 12, Michael is given a similar role in the last battle at the end of time as he had in the revolt of the angels in heaven at the beginning, as military leader of the forces of good.

Michael in Later Stories.

There are many other legends of Michael's intervention on behalf of Christians in history, of which we will mention two as particularly noteworthy. He is said to have worked with the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, and a celebration on 8 November became the main feast of St Michael in the Eastern Church. Also he is said to have appeared over the mausoleum of Emperor Hadrian in Rome to answer the prayers of Pope St Gregory the Great in 950 that a plague in Rome stop, after which the mausoleum, destroyed by the Visigoths and Goths but rebuilt as a papal fort and residence, was called Castel Sant'Angelo, Church of the Holy Angel, the angel being Michael, and is still there to-day with a HUGE statue of St Michael on top of it.

It was later connected by a fortified covered passage, the Passeto di Borgo, to St Peter's Basilica by Pope Nicholas II (pope from 25 November 1277 to 22 August 1280), to provide an escape route for the popes, which turned out handy for Pope Clement VII.

Now there's a story!  Clement had allied with French forces to offset the power of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, he to whom the Augsburg Confession was presented, and Charles' army had defeated them in Italy. However, there was no money to pay the soldiers, and it is never ever a good idea to mess with military payroll then, now, or ever. In this case, the troops figured well hell, there's all these riches in Rome, let's go there and take them if we're not going to get paid, which is exactly what they did, about wiping out the Swiss Guards on 5/6 May 1527, the "Sack of Rome". Clement made it out to Castel Sant'Angelo but became a prisoner there and eventually surrendered on 6 June.

Neither the HRE Charles nor Martin Luther approved of this, but it did have the practical effect of curbing papal power over the Holy Roman Empire, with a lot of money and land changing hands. Luther saw Christ's providence in this, or at least a great irony, saying that the Emperor who persecuted the Lutheran Reformation for the Pope ends up himself having to destroy the Pope. Might just be something to that. To commemorate the fight put up by the Swiss Guards, new ones have their swearing-in on 6 May to this day.

The Passeto and Castel sant'Angelo still exist, the latter now as an Italian national museum.  Not surprisingly, so much intrigue having played out in it historically, it is the headquarters of the "Illuminati" in the fictional "Angels and Demons", a recent movie by Dan Brown of da Vinci Code fame.

St Michael has thus become the patron of guardians of various kinds, from policemen to the sick. Western church writings speak of his feast from at least the 6th century, and other observances based on other appearances and legends arose elsewhere. But 29 September as the Feast of St Michael is among the oldest observances in the Western calendar.

The Feast of St Michael the Archangel, and All Angels.

Why is that? Not to mention, how is that? For feast days, the custom in the church is to take the date of a saint's death, that being the day he was born to eternity as it were, as his feast day, or if that is unknown, the date of something else he did or is associated with him. Now Michael being an angel and all, didn't die, so it can't be his date of death, so what is that something else?

Here's what. The feast isn't actually the Feast of St Michael, but the Feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St Michael. The Leonine Sacramentary, from the Sixth Century (the 500s) gives a Feast of the Birth of the Basilica of the Angel on the way to Salaria.  The Gelesian Sacramentary, from the Seventh Century, gives a Feast of St Michael the Archangel, but both of these were on 30 September. Then in the Eighth Century, the Gregorian Sacramentary gives a Feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St Michael the Archangel, but puts it on 29 September, which is when they had a vigil for the dedication.

That's just as well -- gonna need 30 September for the Feast of St Jerome, who died on that day in 420. So we have a feast on 29 September of the dedication of a church to St Michael, howdya like that? Two things about that. For one thing, "church", didn't it say basilica, what the hell is a basilica? A basilica originally was not a church at all, but a meeting place for merchants and mercantile justice, but as they were pretty nice big buildings, they got taken over as churches, with the state Catholic Church and all, and later such churches were called basilica from the get-go.

For another, the specific basilica whose dedication established the feast on 29 September hasn't existed for over a thousand years! One thing's for sure though. 29 September sure in the hell ain't what Vatican II made of it in the novus ordo, where it's now the Feast of Michael, Gabriel and Rafael.  Utter revisionist bullroar. 29 September has been about Michael, and the whole company of angels by extension, since it started, and even if the basilica disappeared a thousand years ago, why in the hell a thousand years later does the Whore of Babylon mess with it?

Because that's what the Whore of Babylon does, mess with things. Gabriel has his own feast day, which is 24 March, and in the Eastern church his day is 8 November in the Julian Calendar, which is 21 November in the Gregorian Calendar, and he has two other days as well (26 March and 13 July if you wanna know, the first for his role in the Annunciation and the other for all his other stuff). Rafael has his own feast day too, which is 24 October.

It's interesting the both these feasts were only put in the General Roman Calendar in 1921, however, in the sanctoral calendars at lexorandi.org, the 1731 Lutheran Almanac, on the 200th Anniversary of the Presentation of the Augsburg Confession, has Gabe's but not Rafe's, and "The Calendar", which I believe is Loehe's, has Rafe's but not Gabe's.  My "Manual of Prayers", ordered prepared by the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore with Imprimatur 17 May 1889 by James Cardinal Gibbons no less (it was my dad's, I'm old but not that old), has Rafe on 24 October and Gabe but on 18 March, so 1921 didn't start anything but standardised it for Rome.

To its credit, among the many things to its credit, The Lutheran Hymnal -- you know, THE Lutheran Hymnal -- doesn't jack around with any of that, but simply retains The Feast of St Michael and All Angels, and to its credit, Lutheran Service Book, while it does often follow the novus ordo model of jacking around with stuff, doesn't jack around with this one. And given that the dedication thing has kind of lost its significance, the basilica being dedicated being gone a millennium now, it's still worth mentioning since originally that is why 29 September.

And yes, it's kind of like an All Angels Day too. Which is just fine. St Michael being the commander of the angelic forces, like any good commander, he doesn't forget his men.

Michaelmas the Quarter Day.

We ain't done! Michaelmas has all sorts of stuff attached to it. For one thing, Michaelmas is also one of the four Quarter Days in Mother England: Lady Day 25 March, Midsummer Day 24 June, Michaelmas 29 September, Christmas 25 December.

What the hell is a Quarter Day? These are four days roughly equivalent to the two equinoxes and two solstices, when business and legal dealings need to be settled -- rents and bills are due (the rent thing is still often followed in England), judges had to visit outlying areas to make sure no matters go on unresolved, servants and labourers are hired so employment isn't up in the air, stuff like that. This is big stuff, coming from the Magna Carta itself of 1215, when the barons secured against the king, John at the time, the principle that no-one's right to justice will be sold, denied, or delayed.

Ever gone to a job fair resume in hand to meet prospective employers? You're right in the tradition of Michaelmas! At harvest's end, on the day after Michaelmas labourers would assemble in the towns for just that purpose with a sign of the work they do in their hands to get employment for the next year. Such events came to be called Mop Fairs, from those seeking employment as maids showing up with a broom in hand, like a resume to show the prospective employer what work they could do.

Pay your taxes due in April? You're right in the tradition of the Quarter Days! Lady Day was the first day of the calendar year until the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, and when taxes were due. The English tax year still starts on "Old" Lady Day, 6 April.  "Old"?  Read on; there's an "old" Michaelmas too.

Btw, the lady in Lady Day is Jesus' mother Mary, and the day is more widely known as the Feast of the Annunciation, commemorating the announcement by Gabriel to Mary that if she consented she would bear Jesus, nine months before his birth 25 December. And re calendars, Julian refers to Julius Caesar who set the old calendar, and Gregorian refers to Pope St Gregory who modified it into what we use to-day.

"Old" Michaelmas and New Calendars. 

In England, the modified more accurate Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1752, and on 3 September in the old Julian Calendar the date became 14 September in the new Gregorian calendar. Many were confused by this, thinking they had lost 11 days of their lives, leading to protests in the streets. Michaelmas was the first big deal to happen after the change, leading some to say that since we lost 11 days, Michaelmas is really 10 October in the new calendar, which is then "Old" Michaelmas Day.

A lot of the resistance to the Gregorian calendar came from it being done by a pope. It was actually the work of Aloysius Lilius.  Whozat?  An Italian mathematician and astronomer who did the essential work of correcting the drift of the Julian calendar.  The year in the Julian calendar is 11 minutes shorter than a year actually is, so over the centuries the date of the March equinox isn't on the March equinox, for example, which throws off when Easter is along with everything else.  Christmas in July indeed!  The church needed to fix this.

Lilius' work, with some tweaking by Christopher Clavius, a German Jesuit mathematician, was proposed to the papal commission in charge of calendar reform in 1575.  Gregory made it official on 24 February 1582 in the papal bull "inter gravissimas". It's named as is the custom in many places from its first couple of words, which here mean "among the most serious", and changing to the new calendar was taken in many Protestant countries as a deference to papal power.

More musty stuff from Past Elder that can be left in the must?  Yeah well it's why we have the calendar in world-wide use now.  And also, in computer science there is the Lilian Date, named after Lilius, which is used to calculate the number of days between any two dates since the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar on 15 October 1582.  The Lilian Date was invented at IBM by Bruce G. Ohms in 1986 and is used in the date conversion routines in IBM's LE (language environment) software.

And Clavius is quite a guy, twice over.  He started out thoroughly in the thinking of his time, the geocentric model of the universe, along with the theological addendum that since the Bible presents the universe in those terms, if it isn't in those terms then what can you believe the Bible about anyway and the faith falls apart (the issue another post here in September takes up).  Nonetheless, he saw there are problems with the Ptolemaic model though he opposed Copernicus.  Galileo respected him for that, and the two met in 1611 going over the observations now (then) possible with a telescope, and guess what, he changed his mind, and, didn't lose his faith.

Also, in logic, there is Clavius' Law, lex clavia in Latin, aka consequentia mirabilis, the admirable consequence.  So what's that?  It establishes that a proposition is true if its negation (opposite) is inconsistent.  There's two aspects to this.  If a statement is inconsistent then its opposite must be true, so, if a statement is inferred from its opposite being inconsistent that's the consequentia mirabilis, and if a statement itself is inconsistent then the inferred opposite will be true is the lex clavis.  Huh, gimme an example, never heard of it!

OK, heard of Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum (that's pronounced KO-jee-to btw), I think therefore I am?  There you go.  You might think the thinking is all messed up but there's no denying there was thinking itself, therefore a thinker.  Actually Aristotle said this long ago, in the Nicomachean Ethics (1170a25) and in the Protrepticus, which survives in fragments.  (Judas H, what's a protrepticus?  A protrepsis is a rhetorical exhortation to get you to think or live differently than you are, another word for which is paraenesis, though sometimes paraenesis is used to mean exhortation to continue thinking or living the way you are.)

Or how about this.  Someone says, there are no truth statements.  But for that to be true there must be truth statements.

Here's the consequentia mirabilis (lex clavia, Clavius' Law) in formal notation:
 is equivalent to .

Michaelmas, Curfews, Goose Dinners and Sheriffs.

We still ain't done!  For centuries, it was a holy day of obligation -- you gotta go to Mass. As the Germans were Christianised, St Michael took the place of Wotan, and you will find St Michael chapels in the mountains, previously sacred to Wotan, there to this day.  

Michaelmas was also the start of winter curfew, which lasts until Shrove Tuesday, with bells being rung at 2100 hours (that's 9pm) to signal the curfew, which is literally lights out, "curfew" meaning "cover the fire", put out the household fires and lamps.

Michaelmas is also called Goose Day, because goose is eaten for the meal, coming from the practice of those who couldn't pay their rent or bills on the Quarter Day offering a goose instead to the landlord. There's an old rhyme -- He who eats goose on Michaelmas Day, shan't money lack his debts to pay.

It also started the new term, Michaelmas term, at Oxford and Cambridge. Still does!

It is also the day when peasants on manors elected their new reeve. What the hell is a reeve? A serf elected by the other serfs to manage the land for the landowner nobleman, the lord. A reeve of an entire shire was a shire-reeve. What the hell is a shire? That's what counties were called in Mother England before the Norman Conquest, county being the name of the land controlled by a count in continental Europe where the damn Normans came from. Bunch of old stuff lost in history? Got a sheriff in your county? It's exactly why the chief law enforcement officer of your county is called a sheriff, a contraction over time of shire reeve, and why your county isn't called a shire.

Now.

So there's stuff from this all around our modern life. And now, maybe, one more. Back to the legends about St Michael, one of them is, when he kicked Satan out of heaven, which was on 29 September story goes, Satan fell to earth and landed in a bunch of blackberry thorns, which totally ticked him off so he cursed the fruit of the bush, stomped on them, breathed fire on them, spat on them and just generally went nuts. This curse renews every Michaelmas Day, so, what ever you do, DO NOT pick or eat blackberries after Michaelmas!

Which in our digital age opens a whole new question -- if you have a Blackberry phone, can you use it after Michaelmas Day?

Aren't saint's days just a riot? A little bit of something real -- there really is a St Michael the Archangel and he really is the military commander of God's forces, stands ready with all the faithful angels to help and protect you, and will function as such on the End Time -- and a whole lot of legend, leading to some pretty amazing history, both of which have left common elements large and small on life to-day.

Happy Michaelmas! And have some goose, but before 2100. And touch up that resume, if you're looking for a job. Been there and it's tough. Put your trust in God, in this and in all things; I mean who is like God, just like Michael's name means.  And, you got people -- and angels.

Temples, Taxes, Vespasian and Now. (2021)

Vespasian is usually mentioned as this terrible pagan Roman general who hated God and whose forces therefore obliterated Jerusalem and the Temple in it.  Actually, his campaign in Palestine is rather of a sidelight in his career and had no religious motivation at all.  What's more, if it weren't for the same guy in charge of destroying Jerusalem and the Temple there would be no Judaism now at all.  The real deal about him will show us something important about religious reactions, to him and more importantly religious reactions to things in general.  Here's the deal.

Temples.

First Temple.

The destruction of the second temple shows that Israel has been a massive pain in the butt for everybody else for centuries, not just recently.  Notice it's second Temple.  There's been two temples, and both were destroyed by conquering foreign powers.  

The original Temple was built by King Solomon, who reigned from about 970 to 931 BC (or BCE if you will), helped by an architect from Tyre in Phoenicia (now in Lebanon) named Hiram.  It was to replace the Tabernacle constructed 440 years earlier under Moses as the Israelites went from Egypt through the Sinai Desert on their way to conquer Canaan.  Thus it was to be God's dwelling place on earth, and be the sole place of worship sacrifices, replacing local ones.  Solomon's dad King David had gotten quite wealthy from trade with the Phoenicians.  

More murky historical stuff nobody cares about from Past Elder?  Yeah well the Phoenician alphabet is the oldest one, traders carried it across their known world, the Romans adopted and adapted it, whereupon it became the alphabet used world wide now and is the reason you're reading this or anything else, so relax.

This first Temple, Solomon's, was plundered by Pharaoh Shoshenq I of Egypt (called Shishak in the Bible) about 926 BC during the reign of Solomon's son and successor Rehoboam, at a time of Israelite civil war during which they split into the Kingdom of Judah (the tribes of Judah and Levi) and the Kingdom of Israel (the other ten tribes) to the north.  Not least of the issues in the split was the Temple, which put out of business the various local temples and their priests.

It was restored in 835 BC by Jehoash, King of Judah.  Then it was plundered again about 700 BC by Sennacherib, King of Assyria (capital, Nineveh, modern day Mosul, Iraq, see Kings II in the Bible), not on religious reasons as he plundered everyone who didn't accept Assyrian rule, especially the Babylonians; he obliterated Babylon (about 53 miles south of modern Baghdad, Iraq) in 689 BC.  Assyria also obliterated the Kingdom of Israel around 722 BC or so and deported the people (2 Kings 17:6) to nobody knows where exactly as no identifiable further record of them exists, hence lost "Lost Tribes of Israel".  Josephus says they were beyond the Euphrates River and too numerous to even guess by his time.  This left the Kingdom of Judah, which is why Jews are called "Jews" since the other tribes are lost (lots of fanciful theories about where they went abound). 

Assyria fell apart amidst internal strife, Babylon came roaring back which kind of got the Egyptians nervous, and when King Jehoakim of Judah quit paying tribute -- which doesn't mean saying nice words, "tribute" comes from the Latin tributum, meaning contribution; it's money and/or goods and services given as a sign of submission -- and hoped the Egyptians would contain the Babylonians,  Nebuchadnezzar (the second, actually) eventually conquered Jerusalem on 16 March 597 BC and looted the city and the Temple, and took the current king and other notables, like Ezechiel, to Babylon.  But resistance remained, the new king Zedekiah allied with the Egyptians, the prophet Jeremias warned this is not gonna end well, and it didn't.  

Nebuchadnezzar had enough and obliterated the Temple in 587 BC and started resettling the locals to Babylon, the famous "Babylonian Captivity".  So now all twelve tribes had been deported.  This wasn't just about the Israelites; resettlement of conquered peoples for more politically practical reasons was a common practice in ancient Assyria and Babylon.  Ancient?  We do it now!  In die Vertreibung (expulsion) after WWII about 31 million ethnic Germans were expelled from lands that would no longer be Germany as the victors determined the borders that would eventually become Germany as it is now.  Then again the Nazi Generalplan Ost under Himmler planned the ethnic cleansing of eastern Europe for more Germans to move in; the Soviet victory at Stalingrad started the process by which it wasn't successful.  And there's the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1947/8 in which about 700,000 Palestinians were evicted or fled to avoid eviction in the creation of the modern State of Israel.

Second Temple.

The second Temple dates from 516 BC.  What happened?  Babylon fell to Persia, or in modern terms, Iraq fell to Iran, in 539 BC, that's what.  The great Babylon was overtaken by a power that became even greater, Persia, specifically, the First Persian Empire, sometimes called Achaemenid Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great (Cyrus II actually; Cyrus I was his grandfather).  It became the largest empire the world had yet known and lasted until it was conquered by Alexander the Great, who greatly respected Cyrus' legacy and made a point of visiting his grave in 330 BC.  His grave is still there, in his capital Pasargadae, near modern Shiraz, Iran; a UNESCO World Heritage Site and to this day site of celebrations on Cyrus the Great Day, on 29 October, the day Cyrus entered Babylon, and on Nowruz, Iranian New Year, on the spring (in the northern hemisphere) equinox on or around 21 March.

There's a lot to respect.  Cyrus was a conqueror indeed, but he did not obliterate those he conquered and allowed them to keep their culture within his empire under a client-ruler (satrap).  In a move that was not unique toward the Jews but actually typical of him toward conquered peoples, Cyrus issued an edict whereby the Jewish exiles in Babylon were allowed to return to their land and rebuild their temple.  This momentous event is among many other places recorded in the Bible; in fact the Jewish Bible, which is more or less the Christian Old Testament though with the books in a different order, ends with the account of the edict in II Chronicles 36.

(Side note.  Chronicles was originally one book called The Matters of the Days in Hebrew.  When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek couple centuries before Christ since most Jews spoke Greek at that time (what is called the Septuagint) the book was divided in two and called The Things Left to the Side, or Paralipomena in Greek.  When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin in C5 AD (what is called the Vulgate) he called them Chronicon, Chronicles in English, and the two-part division and the name Chronicles has pretty much stuck in anybody's translation since, although older RC translations like the one I grew up with whose OT is based on the Septuagint, which has a few more books than the Hebrew canon, retained the name Paralipomena, along with other Greek-like spellings such as Ezechiel and Jeremias that I use sometimes.)        

The fact is, the usual term "captivity" makes it seem much different than it actually was.  Psalm 137 (136 in the Septuagint and Vulgate, the famous "super flumina babylonis", above the waters of Babylon), which the Septuagint attributes to the prophet Jeremias no less, is a lament of the exiles for being in Babylon rather than Judah, not for being treated poorly, human rights abuses as we might say now, but for being unable to sing a song in a strange land of their native land even when asked to by the Babylonians, and prays that their right hand lose its ability if they forget Jerusalem (guess there weren't any lefties) or prefer present joys to Jerusalem.

Yes they were exiles with the loss of their land and Temple, but they were not slaves, they were not prisoners, they were not badly treated.  In fact in 538 BC when Cyrus allowed their return to the land from which they were exiled most chose to stay!  Esther, a Jewish woman and protagonist of the Biblical book, became the wife of whom the book names Ahasuerus, King of Persia, and thus a Jew becomes Queen of Persia!  (The story is pretty wild; I'll leave that to the book.)  Ahasuerus is generally identified as Xerxes I, the fifth king of the Achaemenid Empire (First Persian Empire) from 486 to 465 BC.  He's the one who lost big-time to the Greeks under Themistocles at Salamis in September 480 BC.  The Septuagint and the Vulgate identify him as Artaxerxes I, the sixth king and the third son of Xerxes, whose rule was 465 to 424 BC.  Either way, well after 538 BC when Cyrus allowed the return. 

So, there's ambivalence in the Bible itself about the return -- unless one is one of those who can't handle ambivalence in what is supposed to be the word of God and thus says since it can't be it isn't.  On the one hand, Isaias (oh sorry, Isaiah) 45:1 says God anointed Cyrus to make his proclamation of return and rebuilding, and as anointed one is what messiah means, he is so described, the only non-Jew in the Bible to be called an anointed one of God.  On the other hand, most Jews stayed.  For those who returned, the rebuilding of the Temple was complete in 516 BC, a little over twenty years after the return.  This is recorded in the Book of Esdras (oh sorry, Ezra), which was originally one book along with the Book of Nehemias (oh sorry, Nehemiah), the two were not separated until the first printed Bibles in C16 AD, and also recorded in variants called 3 and 4 Esdras, or 1 and 2 Esdras by those who call 1 and 2 Esdras Ezra and Nehemiah, found in the Apocrypha in modern Bibles if that is included.

Second Temple Judaism was not like that of the First, in either the building or the religion.  The building itself was not a reconstruction of the first but a rather plain structure, which those returnees old enough to remember the first found very disappointing.  It is not the ruins of this building that are there to-day but we'll get to that.  Also, the returnees did not return to the Kingdom of Judah; the kings were gone, and the land became a client-state of Persia under its Babylonian name Yehud.  Before, the temple priesthood was subordinate to the kings, but with them gone, the priesthood increased in power, with the High Priest effectively becoming the ruler, a role that would endure after the Greeks and then the Romans took over, with the latter making sure the High Priest didn't rock the boat.

The second Temple did not have the Ark of the Covenant from the first Temple and the Tabernacle of Moses before it.  One of the strangest things about the Bible is that despite the enormous importance of the Ark, containing the stone tablets given by God to Moses at Mount Sinai and all, there is absolutely no mention of what happened to it after the destruction of the first Temple.  Speculation abounds of course, to the present day even to hit movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

And too, in contrast to Jewish reaction to later catastrophe, it was thought that God had allowed the destruction of the first Temple and the "captivity" due to their lack of adherence to Biblical religion and dalliance with the gods and women of those around them, so on returning a great emphasis was placed on getting it right and sticking to it -- no intermarriage, even with those who hadn't been deported, a purity of community, a purity of Temple worship with the priestly animal sacrifices, and study of the Law of Moses and the Prophets.  To this end, Esdras and the 120 Men of the Great Assembly (Nehemias 10) codified existing observances into three times of prayer to correspond with the times of sacrifice in the Temple, morning, afternoon and evening, thus establishing a form that is still used in synagogue worship and was adapted by the Christian church into Matins, Vespers and Compline.  

They also established the central prayer of Jewish worship, the Amidah, which means "standing" because it is said standing, also called the Shemoneh Esreh, which means "eighteen" because it is composed of eighteen blessings, said on weekdays at all three times of prayer to this day.  The Amidah for Sabbath condenses the petitions since Sabbath is a foretaste of eternity when no petitions are needed, and the Christian church evolved a Christian prayer in exactly its structure, which is said to this day too -- usually called the Gloria, from its first word in Latin.  They also finalised the canon, the list of books to be considered authoritative, of the Hebrew Bible as we have it now (when used as the Old Testament in Christian Bibles the book order is different but the list is the same).

The building was different too, twice over.  What is there in ruins now is neither the first Temple nor the original second Temple but a massive rebuilding and replacement of it undertaken by Herod the Great, Jewish client king to the Romans of Judea at the time of Jesus' birth.  Herod was Jewish, but an Edomite (descendant of Esau) and also a Roman citizen.  He began as governor of Galilee in 41 BC with the backing of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, was appointed King of Judea by the Roman Senate in 37 BC and given military support to bring the area under tighter Roman control.  When Marc Antony lost out to Octavian as the Roman Empire was taking over the Roman Republic Herod was solidly behind the new Empire and switched allegiance to Octavian, who as Caesar Augustus was the new and first Emperor and the guy mentioned in the famous nativity account in Luke read at Christmas who ordered the census.  Herod brought a great deal of prosperity to Judea and at the same time was quite cruel.  Look at the dates -- all this is happening in the unsettled violent change from Republic to Empire, same era as the Arminius episode, and Herod was concerned to maintain his power.  This is the same Herod who would order the Massacre of the Innocents recorded in Matthew, but nowhere else, which some say indicates the passage is a literary invention to mirror the Passover slaughter in Exodus, but given that Herod had his wife (one of them, anyway) and several of his children killed as well as many others as threats to his power that particular massacre probably wasn't all that significant to warrant mentioning with non-Biblical sources.  

The second second Temple, so to speak, Herod's, was begun about 20 BC.  The Temple per se was completed in about three years, but construction on the entire complex continued much longer.  John 2:20 says it had been under construction for 46 years when Jesus went there for Passover.  So, at the time of its destruction in 70 AD none of it was very old at all.  It's what it meant that was, and its loss was of huge impact.  But before we get to the impact of the destruction we need to get to the destruction itself.

Before we do, have you noticed something?  How is it that a guy who died in 4 BC, BC standing for Before Christ, was in power when Christ was born?  That's because Christ was around Before Christ too.  Huh?  Here's the deal.  The calendar in world-wide use now was originally produced by commission of Pope Gregory the Great, who was head of the Roman Empire's state Catholic Church a little over a hundred years after the Western half of the Roman Empire, the part with Rome actually in it, collapsed in 476 AD.  Part of the idea was to number the years going forward starting with Christ and going backward from him.  Thing is, the calculations of what year that was were a little off but we didn't know that until the calendar had been in standard use for centuries.  So keeping the same year numbers, the year Christ came was about 4 BC.

Taxes and Religious Significances.

While Jews and Christians assign various religious significances to the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem, to the Romans doing it had no religious motivation or significance whatever.  

The Romans could not care less about whatever local religious observances there were in the areas they controlled, unless they rocked the boat about who runs things.  What motivated the First Jewish Revolt was all about who is the true god and what therefore one does or does not do, such as pay taxes to foreign rulers, but the Roman reaction to it was mostly about the non-payment of taxes by Jews who thought it wrong to pay them, as well as attacks by Jews on Romans in the area, not about who was right about God.  The Roman governor ordered the Temple plundered for the money since they would not pay, which resulted in an escalation in which the Roman garrison was taken and the client king (Agrippa) had to flee.  When initial attempts to quash the rebellion failed, Emperor Nero had enough and ordered General Vespasian to take over and, as we might say now, turn it into a parking lot.

This question of taxation by the Romans that would lead to the obliteration of Jerusalem was long-standing.  It's the same issue in the New Testament passages Mark 12:13-17, also told in Matthew 22:16-22 and Luke 20:20-26, namely, asking Jesus if it's moral according to God to pay taxes to Rome.  It's the same issue in Jesus calling a tax collector for the Romans who was himself Jewish to be among the Apostles!  Who, btw, was Matthew himself!  Not the kind of guy you want around if you're looking to attract followers, since he would have been largely despised, yet Jesus called him and not after extensive catechesis or a change of heart on Matthew's part but while he was on the job collecting taxes, just telling him "Follow me."  It's the same issue in the famous parable told in Luke 18:9-14 of the Pharisee and the Publican, sometimes translated tax collector.

OK, what's a publican?  Don't hear anybody talking about publicans now do you?  Yeah you do, we just don't use that term for them.  A publican (publicanus in Latin) was a private contractor with a public government contract for which it successfully bid.  They're in the news now all the time.  Then as now a lot of their activity was in construction of public works and buildings, and in supplying the military.  This practice began after the overthrow of the Kingdom and the establishment of the Republic around 500 BC and the oldest surviving account of such activity is from 390 BC.  Our modern practice comes directly from the Roman Republic.  But there are two important differences.

One is, there was no Roman IRS, and the publicans also collected taxes in Roman controlled areas.  The other is, Senators could not participate in running a publican company (societas publicanorum) and publicans could not hold Senate seats.  No Dick Cheneys.  Also, publicans were mostly of the equites class, which is often translated as Knights but was not knights in the mediaeval sense we usually think of, but a property-owning based class (horses were part of the property, which is the basis for the later use of the term) and, they were the lower of its two ranks, with the senatorial class number one.  That's the Republic.  With the Empire this began, along with much else, to change.  It had to.

In the Republic, there was a temporary position called dictator (one who speaks, ie commands) which the government could appoint for a specific cause (causa) to address a crisis.  The dictator was to resign upon completion of the task or after six months.  Julius not-yet-Caesar had gathered a great deal of power from his wars in Gaul (France) and Britannia (England) and the Senate ordered him to resign his command and return to Rome.  To do so would leave him open to prosecution as a war criminal, so instead, he returned to Rome alright but at the head of his 13th Legion (Legio tertia decima gemina) which was illegal as hell, a capital offence actually to exercise imperium (command) in Rome itself, crossing the boundary river the Rubicon 10 January 49 BC.

He knew exactly what he was doing and what would happen.  It's from this event that we get the phrase "crossing the Rubicon" for taking an action after which there is no reversal or point of return, and also the phrase "the die is cast", from his reported words by Suetonius "iacta alea est" as they waded through the river (it's shallow), though modern usage usually changes the original word order to alea iacta est. 

The die was cast.  He was now not only open to prosecution as a war criminal but subject to the death penalty for violating the restrictions of command.  It set in motion a long civil war in which the Roman bureaucracy was centralised and strengthened, what was left of the Senate proclaimed him dictator perpetuo (dictator in perpetuity), two months later on the proverbial Ides of March (the 15th) in 44 BC he was assassinated in the Senate, which in turn led to further civil war, with his adopted son Octavian being named Augustus (illustrious one) by the weakened Senate on 16 January 27 BC, though he himself liked Romulus as a title, as the reference to the founder of Rome connoted a second founding of Rome, and Imperator Caesar divi filius, Commander Caesar the son of the god (Julius Caesar had been declared a god by the Senate on 1 January 42 BC).

So there you go, from imperium legally broken to Imperator legally established, from complete defiance of the Roman Republic and its concepts to a Roman Empire based on very non-Roman concepts.  This is covered in more detail on other posts on this blog, but the point here is, in the time of Jesus' public ministry, 30-33 AD, the Jewish Revolt, 66-73 AD and the destruction of the second Temple in it (70 AD), Rome was not this great monolith but in the stages of becoming one amid great political and social upheaval in changing from the Republic to something very different, the Empire, with sentiment from significant Romans that this change was not for the best and being a republic was better.

This wasn't a problem just for Jesus.  What we now consider great Roman figures also had a tough time in this transition -- Cicero, Horace, Seneca, Stoics in general, Tactitus, all of them leery of the Empire and much in sympathy with the former Republic.  To the extent that not just Jesus died in this context -- Cicero was executed and Seneca, under orders from Nero, committed suicide.

At the time of Jesus' death the Empire was quite new, only 60 years old.  When the great revolt began it was 93 years old.  When the Temple was destroyed it was 97 years old and just the year before experienced huge upheaval with the death of Emperor Nero.  Territorial governors like Herod and local tax collectors like the publican were in a very precarious position toward both the local population and the government they worked for, with their roles changing dramatically as the autocratic centralized nature of imperial Rome rapidly evolved and diminished them. 

Vespasian.

Vespasian distinguished himself in the ongoing conquest of Britannia, which began in 43 AD under Emperor Claudius, in which Vespasian commanded one of the four legions sent (Legio secunda Augusta, to be specific).  He retired from the military after that and pursued a political career, retiring in 51 after incurring the disfavour of Claudius' (fourth) wife Julia Agrippina, who was the mother of Nero by an earlier marriage and whom Claudius made his heir.  Vespasian's military expertise is no doubt why Nero appointed him to take care of this political problem.  Josephus' account is controversial among Jews; he was a Jew himself, but also a Roman citizen and had imperial patronage.  Ironically, he regarded Vespasian highly.

With the death of Nero political chaos fell upon the new Empire, and in 69 was the Year of Four Emperors, Vespasian being the last.  Theoretically, he did not have the pedigree for that, being of the equestrian not senatorial class, but the army was behind him and the Senate soon confirmed him.  He was all for the Empire, and it being rather new at the time, was suspicious of those still hankering for the old Republic, particularly the Stoics.  He was otherwise known as quite amiable though.  As Emperor he embarked upon many reforms, extended financial generosity to many, and to the public as a whole. 

One such is still famous, the so-called Colosseum!  It's real name is Amphitheatrum Flavium, or Flavian Amphitheatre in English.  Why "Flavian"?  It's from Vespasian's actual name.  In English we tend to refer to significant Romans by one name, but a Roman had three.  His was Titus Flavius Vespasianus.  Flavius is his nomen, the name that gives your clan (gens) and identifies you as a citizen, hence the Romans would use that and not what looks like a "last" name in English but in Latin is a cognomen, originally a nickname but later identifying your family within the clan.

Flavian also describes the dynasty he established.  After a ten-year reign, he was succeeded by his son Titus, who had also taken over the destruction of Jerusalem when his dad got involved in bigger stuff, and also was then the first emperor to be succeeded by a biological heir.

Among his reforms was the re-institution of vectigal urinae, yup, a urine tax, not for taking a leak but for buying urine!  Huh?  Well, public toilets also were a collection place for pots to piss in from lower classes, and the urine was used for its ammonia content in tanning and laundering.  Yes, laundering.  There's a great story Suetonius records that when his dad re-instituted the tax his son Titus said "Dad, that's just gross" (or words to that effect in Latin) whereupon Vespasian held up a coin and asked Titus if that seemed gross, and when Titus said No, Vespasian said pecunia non olet, money doesn't stink.  The phrase is still used to distinguish money from its source, and I think the term for a public toilet in French and Italian is a Vespasian; why Spanish did not get this I do not know!  Marx himself in Das Kapital uses the phrase to identify the phenomenon that from money itself one cannot tell how the person with money got it or from what trade it came.

Vespasian was all for the Empire.  We saw that the huge transition from a Republic to an Empire meant Rome was discarding some essential Roman ideas and principles, and the Empire was thus quite un-Roman.  So, by the time Rome defined the Roman Catholic Church by imperial decree and made it the state religion in 380 (Cunctos populos) the state church was quite in line with the distinctly un-Roman characteristics of the Empire.  Its further development after the Empire faded and the "Holy" one came about was also quite in line with that, and even now this former state church retains the nature of the state church though the state is gone.  In short, the Catholic Church is in no way the catholic church.

Third Temple?

Vespasian is remembered for his role in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, though his son Titus finished the job, but, he should also be remembered for his role allowing the creation of a form of Judaism that could survive the destruction and is the form in which we know Judaism now, so it's not so ironic after all that Josephus thought highly of him.

As the destruction neared, everyone understood that this would end everything if it happened.  There wouldn't even be a "captivity" somewhere.  So, a Pharisee named Yohanan ben Zakkai tried hard to get the Jewish side to stand down, and when they wouldn't, he arranged a secret meeting with Vespasian to save what he could from the now inevitable destruction.  He asked Vespasian only for sparing the town of Yavne (Jamnia) and its teachers, as well as Gamaliel's descendants and a physician to attend a Rabbi Zadok who had been fasting 40 years that things might not end this way.

Zadok is an interesting name for a rabbi.  Zadok is the name of the high priest of the First Temple of Solomon and David and from whom the priestly party in the Second Temple, the Sadducees, were named and claimed legitimacy, and who accepted only the Torah (first five books of anyone's Bible, the books of Moses).  The teachers and scholars in local synagogues, the rabbis, had no Biblical office, accepted the Prophets and Other Writings as well as oral tradition and the ability to make further rulings as necessary, and weren't so sure a Temple built under foreign authority was all that legitimate.  These are the Pharisees, which means "ones set apart", as in for teaching and study. 

Vespasian granted his request.  Upon which, Yohanan told him he would be emperor.  Yohanan saw Rome as the fourth of the four world powers prophesied in Daniel 7:23, and saw Vespasian as fulfilling the prediction of Isaias 10:34 that the holy house would fall into the hands of a king.  About three days later, word arrived that Vitellius, the current emperor, was dead and the Senate had named Vespasian emperor.  Vespasian had never supported Vitellius in his overthrow of Otho, the previous emperor, who committed suicide when he lost, and Vespasian's forces defeated Vitellius' forces and killed him, whereupon the Senate proclaimed Vespasian emperor 21 December 69, though communications being what they were at the time, it would be some time before he knew.  That's why Vespasian left for Rome and the actual destruction was carried out under Titus, his son.

The school and centre at Jamnia has enormous ongoing influence.  With the Temple, priesthood and sacrifices gone, the religion revealed by God in the Hebrew Bible was now impossible to do, so what do we do?  Jamnia, be it an actual council or a centre of activity, answered this challenge, and the answer turned the Judaism of the Pharisees into the rabbinical Judaism we have now.

Yohanan issued nine edicts which modified the observance of observances commanded in Torah so they could be done outside Jerusalem and the Temple and its priests, which were now destroyed.  The gathered rabbis also instituted an observance called Tisha B'Av (the ninth of Av, which falls between mid-July to mid-August in the now-standard Gregorian calendar), patterned after Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) with a complete fast and four other prohibitions, and the Book of Lamentations, composed after the destruction of the first Temple and attributed to Jeremias, though the Bible itself is not clear on that.  Regardless, its use laments the destruction of both Temples, which happened on the same day, the ninth of Av, and other calamities that later befell the Jews on or around that day are often added too now.

Lamentations is an extraordinary book.  It both accepts that the destruction was a just response by God to the sins and faithlessness of the people, and notes that maybe the punishment could have been not so harsh.  It accepts that God has been gracious in the past, and notes that this does not guarantee he will be gracious now or in the future.  It accepts that this may mean that God has rejected his people, but hopes that based on the past he will be gracious again.  The church uses it too, as part of a night service called Tenebrae, which existed from at least C9 until early in my lifetime, when in 1955 Pope Pius XII changed Holy Week services into what they are now.  Tenebrae as held now in some churches on Good Friday is loosely based on the original Tenebrae but does not use Lamentations.  (Maybe I can talk my pastor into it one of these days, although a traditional Lutheran Tenebrae on Good Friday evening with the Seven Last Words or a Passion reading is the most gripping service we have so I'll be quite happy if we stick with that.)

The most far-reaching of all of Yohanan's work is this:  what is to replace the sacrifices that bind Man to God now that the place and people to perform them are gone?  Based on Osee, oh sorry, Hosea (the name means "salvation") 6:6, which is, "For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings", he concluded and persuaded the others to conclude that our mitzvoth (prayer and good deeds, especially the 613 commands of the Law of Moses in Torah), replace the sacrifices going forward until such time as the Temple is restored, the Third Temple. 

Now.

So here we are, now.  Is there gonna be a Third Temple?  Depends on who you ask.

Orthodox Jews say yes and pray for it daily.  Orthodox?  What's that?  While all Judaism since the destruction of the second Temple comes from Yochanan et al. at Jamnia, in mid-C19 Germany a movement coalesced around Abraham Geiger (1810-1874) called Reform Judaism, which rejected traditional rabbinic Judaism as really the product of exclusion, a ghetto mentality, incompatible with modern life, but did not see it as a rejection but reclaiming the ongoing spirit of rabbinic Judaism from its shell, much as Ezra and the 120 Men of the Great Assembly had done.  Each synagogue was a temple, not just one in Jerusalem, so there is no need to restore it or the sacrifices which reflect a primitive time out of which we have grown.  A middle ground between the two emerged in Germany around Zecharias Frankel (1801-1875) known as Conservative Judaism, and its position on the Temple and sacrifices is typical: yes to rebuilding the Temple, no to the sacrifices and references to sacrifice are removed from the Amidah and other prayers.  Both of these movements are now primarily found in the United States, where many Jews now view being Jewish as more a social and ethnic thing and among those who have a formal affiliation Reform is the biggest.

On top of that, even if the Temple is to be rebuilt, there's a big problem.  The space is taken.  Right on top of the site of both temples is the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine begun by the fifth Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik (646-705).  While the motives behind building it are disputed by historians, its significance is clear:  it's from this site Muhammad's "Night Journey" around 620 through the heavens is held to have happened, beginning with the silver domed al-Aqsa mosque next to it, which is the third holiest site to Muslims of any kind.  All indications are, it ain't going anywhere anytime soon.

Finally, there's another option as to the current significance of the Temple and its sacrifices.  What if the third temple, so to speak, has already happened?  What if the full and final sacrifice has already been offered?  What if that's why there is no reason to mourn the Temple, what it was there for has been fulfilled?  What if that answers the questions of Lamentations, yes we are justly rejected by God for our faithlessness but yes, he will be merciful again, this time to the extent of paying the price himself, becoming incarnate as a human in Jesus of Nazareth to be priest, sacrifice, temple and all?  What if we are just like the lame beggar in Acts 3, who was put by one of the Temple gates to beg, and encounters Peter and John on their way in for Minha (afternoon service)?

Peter, John, the Temple and Jesus are physically gone.  Being a beggar is the same.  He couldn't go to where God was, so God came to where he was.  It's still like that.  We can't go to where he is, so he comes to where we are, priest, sacrifice, Temple and all, as the Office of Holy Ministry rightly preaches the Word and rightly administers the Sacraments of Baptism into his death and Communion in his Body and Blood given for our salvation.

Wir sein Pettler (modern German: Wir sind Bettler).  Hoc est verum.

We are beggars.  This is true. 

The Divine Setting. An Essay on the Lifted Cross. 2021.

Sic enim Deus dilexit mundum ... (Joannes 3:16) For God so loved the world ...

In a previous post, O Friend of God, we dealt with "Holy Cross Day", or as it is sometimes called among us, The Triumph of the Holy Cross.  We saw that the actual name of the day is The Exaltation of the Cross, that exaltation is used in its literal Latin sense of lifting up, and that neither the lifting up nor the cross lifted up refer to the triumph of the cross of Christ as the means of salvation, but to the lifting up of a supposed relic on 14 September 335 A.D in Jerusalem at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which still stands.

So we impose good theology over silly legends about scandalous facts to retain the feast.  This is a problem and this post addresses that problem further, not regarding that particular feast, but regarding the actual triumph of the actual cross.  Over particularly recent centuries and continuing in this one, our empirically based human view of the world, and consequently the value of its parts, has yielded an astounding harvest of knowledge, which may seem at odds with traditional Christian belief.

Thus many people who by training or temperament primarily listen to the voices of human knowledge waver regarding Christianity, either hesitating, thinking they would have to be false to themselves to embrace Christianity, or turning away from it altogether, thinking they have gone beyond it.  And some seek a middle ground by recasting Christianity, trying to both go beyond it but nonetheless preserve its veneer.

This problem is not new and not unique to our times.  It will seem so if one ignores history.  From the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in 476, we have been through several such cultural revolutions, each with increased vigour and effect.

Charlemagne's (768-814) establishment of a new social order akin to the former Empire brought a new emphasis on learning in parish schools.  Otto's (936-973) even moreso.  In the Twelfth Century (1100s), what is now traditional Scholastic theology was in its time an attempt to reconcile the Faith with the rediscovery of secular learning from the ancients.  It was hotly contested from within and without the church, yet, as Aquinas pointed out, if God is the source of all knowledge, ultimately there can be no conflict.  Then came the via moderna, the modern way, in the Fourteenth Century (1300s), seeing the previous developments as the via antiqua, the old way.

Toward the end of which another one began, starting in Florence, often dated for convenience to 1396 with the invitation by Coluccio Salutati, chancellor of the Republic of Florence, to the Byzantine scholar Emmanuel Chrysoloras to come there and teach Greek.  The fall of the Roman Empire in the East to the Muslims in 1453 brought a flood of Greek scholars in its wake.  This brought many new texts to awareness, made others known directly rather than through Latin translations, and began a shift away from the scientific orientation of the previous period to the arts as well.    Hence, "humanism", and the idea that the previous age was a "middle" age between antiquity and the rebirth of its learning, hence the terms Middle Ages and Renaissance.

In all of these, Christian faith was recast into then-current terms, which to those accustomed to the previously current terms seemed like a departure from the Faith.  And in all of them was a distinct sense of having moved forward from the limitations of the past.  Finally in the 1700s came The Enlightenment, where the dawn of modern knowledge brought this tension to a head.  One side of it, best exemplified by Descartes, Locke and Hume, sought harmony between knowledge and faith, though now not necessarily Christian faith but in a more general supreme being (Deism), but the other side of it, best exemplified by Spinoza, was exactly a rejection of Faith, seeing no need to recast what is now surpassed.

And now in our "post modern" age, what may seem a new crisis of faith and empirical knowledge is actually the same problem once again, and once again with increased vigour and effect.

The purpose of this post is to show that traditional Christianity -- Baptism, the Eucharist, and the actual lifting up and actual triumph of the Cross -- does not require any such falsification to oneself or recasting of faith.  An important note, though, as it may seem to some that this post is indeed such a falsification and recasting.  This is not the case.  The entire post is about nothing more, nothing else, and nothing less, than grace  --  the free gift of God for our salvation in the lifting up of the cross and the triumph of the cross, historically, and its fruits given to us here and now sacramentally in Baptism and the Eucharist.

And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.  Et ego si exaltatus fuero a terra omnia traham ad me ipsum.  John 12:32.

What Is Evolution?   

In our time this problem is nowhere more evident than in the supposed conflict between modern scientific knowledge and the account of creation in Genesis.  OK, right here is one of those ironies that this blog finds hilarious.  Wanna know what?  Of course the famous book re evolution is Charles Darwin's (1809-1882) "On the Origin of the Species" (1859).  Guess what, ya know what "genesis" means?  The English word is derived from a Latin word which in turn transliterated into Latin the Greek word for -- origin!  Hey, looks like two contradictory and conflicting accounts of origin, huh?

Well, no.  Genesis is not the name of Genesis in Genesis.  HUH?  OK, Genesis is in the Old Testament and the OT is in Hebrew, right, so why a Greek name?  Because the name in English comes not from the Hebrew Bible but from the Jewish translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek called the Septuagint, that's why.  The Hebrew name for the book is not "origin" (genesis).  Rather, as is customary in Hebrew, the title is derived from its first words, which are "in beginning", bere syt, or bereshit as it is often written in English.  Nothing about origin.  Hey, isn't the beginning the origin?  Well, sort of, but not necessarily, and, there's something in English that makes the translation a bit different than the Hebrew it translates.  Here's the deal.  There is no definite article -- "the" -- in the Hebrew.  There isn't in Latin either.  In the Latin translation of the Bible, called the Vulgate, the first words are translated in principio, at first.  And the next word is -- God (deus).  In (the) beginning, God.  At first, God.

Genesis/Bereshit starts with God.  Not with "the beginning" or "the origin", with God.  God is not proven, not deduced, not induced, not described, not defined, nothing like that.  God simply is.  It's not that there is a "beginning" or an "origin" and God either did or did not have something to do with it.  Rather, God is, before any beginning or origin.  That's why, when Moses asks God his name -- a reasonable question, all the various gods of various people have names, what's yours -- God doesn't give him one.  The "name" he gave himself in Exodus chapter three, there being no present tense of "to be" in Hebrew, can be translated as I am who I am, I will be who I will be, etc. and Moses is told to say I am sent me to you.  "I am" is not a name, it is a third-person use of a first-person statement, God is not god or a god, God just is. Thus, any beginning or origin is an action of God.  So, "the beginning" or "the origin" is not the beginning or origin of everything, it is the beginning of a creative action of God, and that creative action of God is the origin of all things.

The idea of God, of a power greater than ourselves, of something beyond our complete grasp which gives rises to a sense or idea of holy, is a universal sense as ancient as Man.  But that is also problematic.  Man has expressed this sense in a variety of ways.  Sometimes he takes natural forces beyond his control as therefore his gods, and worships them and/or prays to them to control the forces of nature, taken to be gods, in his favour.  Sometimes he posits supra-human beings who control these natural forces, and similarly worships and/or prays to them to the same end.  Sometimes this expression is applied to the totality of the universe, as an impersonal way or law that is operational throughout, within which one can learn to live in harmony.  Sometimes the universe itself is god.

Genesis confirms this universal sense as valid, but contradicts all those expressions of it.  God is not heaven and earth; heaven and earth are creations of God who preexists them and is distinct from them.  Likewise, everything else in the universe, forces like wind and rain, places like rivers, everything, are not gods nor are there gods controlling them.  Nor is God the totality of it, but they are creations of God who preexists and is distinct from them all.  Therefore, they are not objects of worship or veneration either.

The next few verses make that quite clear, as the things Man deifies are described as creations of the deity -- heaven and earth, the seas, the sun, the moon, life in any form, life in human form.  For example, the sun that lights our world is not god, not a god, nor is there a sun-god whose function it is to control the sun.

Well fine.  So is Genesis just another order out of chaos myth from antiquity, all of which we should abandon now as we understand the order better and better?  Is not the ancientness of the sense of a higher power, the idea of holy, itself a sign that these are simply the reactions of men with little knowledge of their environment so they create myths of gods to explain it for lack of anything better, but now that we have something better, we no longer need the myths of earlier times?

Notice something?  We didn't even get to the "six day creation" thing before losing our faith!  In other words, the primary thing revealed, and right away, in Genesis and thus the entire Bible, which is that there is a god and everything else proceeds from the creative action of this one god, doesn't even need the six-day thing before grounds to abandon it arise, passing it off as the early attempts of man to understand his environment, which we have long since passed.

And we notice something else.  Genesis describes God's creative actions in precisely the order we understand them scientifically -- first the material universe and its unfolding, not static, organisation by God (let's call it the geosphere), then its inhabitation by biological life and its unfolding, not static, organisation by God (let's call it the biosphere), then the appearance of biological life that is both conscious and self-reflective, having a mind that shares something then of the God who created it (let's call it the noosphere, from the Greek word for mind, nous).

This is nothing other than evolution, literally.  Now before the moaning and groaning starts (is it too late for that?) let's look at what evolution literally means.  The word comes from the Latin evolutio, which does not mean "evolution" with its modern connotations, but rather an act of rolling out or unfolding.  The root is "e volvo" which means "out of the roll" (yeah, Volvo means roll, great name for a great car, let's roll!). The verb is "evolvo" which means "to unroll" or "to unfold", whose perfect passive participle is "evolutus".  Great linguistic Judas what's that?  Relax, a perfect passive participle is a verb form denoting the state of something having been subject to an action.  Here, it's having been rolled or having been unfolded, "evolutus", which as a verb is "evolutio", the act of rolling out or unfolding.

So, Genesis presents evolution.  The rolling out, the unfolding, of creation by its creator.  Therefore, the argument over "evolution" is not over whether it happened, but how it happened.  Specifically, did this rolling out, this unfolding, which both Genesis and current human knowledge agree happened, happen impersonally according to either random or chance events or laws or ways inherent in Nature, or personally, as the willed creative act of a pre-existent God.

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.

So asks God in Job 38:4.  The question not only addresses Job; it can be asked of any of us, and the point is the same as to Job, which is, God's understanding, as a Being or Power greater than ourselves, is not our understanding nor can our understanding comprehend God's.  Which makes sense.  If there is a God who communicates with us, God speaks to us not as an equal since we are not God or a god, but as a part of his creation that has consciousness to receive the communication, which therefore will have its limits.  God speaks to us in terms of our experience.

This is apparent already in the first sentence of Bereshith.  "The heaven and the earth" describes the universe from Man's point of view here on the earth, not from God's point of view as its Creator.  Our point of view now has expanded, and was not available to humans at the time Bereshith was revealed.  We know that the earth and the heavens are not distinct.  Earth is but one planet revolving around one star among many, the number of which we do not know except that it is huge.  It's all heavens, and earth is part of that, but it doesn't look that way when you're on earth.

The rest of the creation account proceeds along these lines, in terms of our, not God's, experience.  Creation is creation, whether viewed as an earthbound creature seeing "heavens" above, or viewed not from earth and seeing earth too as part of the "heavens".  Heaven and earth, then, are relative terms.  In earlier times, the discovery that earth is not the centre of creation, with heavens above it, seemed to cast doubt on everything -- if Scripture is off in its very first words, why should it not also be off in the rest of it too?

What was lost in that controversy, the famous Galileo episode, was any sense of what God was reminding Job in his circumstances.  And this loss is the very same loss that will lead to what is called The Fall just a little later in Bereshith.  What is this loss?  It is the loss of the fact that God speaks to us in terms of our experience and not his, that God does not reveal to us everything of his experience because we, as created beings, cannot receive or comprehend the experience of our creator.  As Scripture will shortly put it, we are created in the image of God, but we are not created as equals, as other gods, and therefore we cannot elevate our understanding, even that part of it which is an understanding of God, to his level.

This is understandable even if one does not believe in God or any god;  IF there is one, whether or not there is or is not is not the question. that god's totality would not be fully communicable to a created being who does not also have that totality.

In this regard it is significant to note that the noun we translate as "God", singular, in the Hebrew is plural, Elohim, but the verb we translate as "created" IS singular.  Of course we can theologically abstract from this a reference at the outset of Scripture to the Trinity -- a plural God acting in the singular.  But God is not here inviting us to theological abstraction but is revealing to us the nature of our experience as conscious reflective beings.  God is not, in the Bible, providing us a divine textbook, or an algorithm, but a human user's manual, of creation.  And a user's manual is written to convey to the user, in terms his experience will allow him to understand, information he does not have, not about how something was made but about how to work with it.  IOW, it is not a "how I did it", but a "how you use it" book, what is called a vademecum, which means "Go with me", directions to be taken along as one goes about doing something.

Vade mecum.  Go With Me.

So, the revelation of the fact of creation is one thing, and the manner of creation is another, and the two ought not be confused.  God reveals the fact of creation by expressing it in terms of human conscious experience at the time of revelation.  Light and dark, heaven and earth, evening and morning, day -- all of them earth bound, not characteristic of the universe.  There is no evening and morning as we experience it here on earth anywhere else but here on earth.  There is no 24 hour day as we experience it here on earth anywhere else but here on earth.  Even in our human speaking these words have "literal" and "figurative" meanings, as in "the evening of life", "shed some light on the subject", and so on.  For that matter, time itself does not flow at the same rate throughout the universe.

Had God revealed the nature of the universe in scientific terms Genesis would have been rejected from the start.  How is a man standing on earth looking up at the heavens to be told that in fact he is not looking up at all, that there is no "up", that "up" is a sense brought about from the fact of his standing in a particular place, and that "beneath" him there is also an "up" he would experience were he standing there?  And how is a man standing on earth looking "up" at the heavens to be told that in fact where he stands is itself part of the heavens, that there are no "heavens" distinct from earth except in his experience of standing in a particular place, and that "above" him there is not a dome holding back water, that the blue he sees above is in fact not there at all, it's a visual effect brought about under the conditions of standing where he stands to look at it, namely, the scattering of light by the gases and particles in the atmosphere and blue scatters more because its wavelength is shorter?  And how is a man standing on earth looking "up" at the "heavens" to be told that not only is he looking out, not up, but he is also looking back, that the light he sees from the stars in the heavens is not what is happening there now, but light from events ages ago that is just now making its way to be visible to someone standing where he does?

All of what we now know would have contradicted his experience entirely and therefore been rejected as fantastic, literally -- a fantasy with no relation to reality, ie, his experience.  Which in turn would leave the message God seeks to communicate to Man inaccessible -- that all of what Man sees, including Man himself, is the creation of the God who seeks him and is subject to the will of God, not Man.  The fact of creation is revealed to Man via a manner of creation that makes sense within his experience at the time of its revelation.  Revelation done any other way would reveal nothing!

Fiat voluntas tua.

Thy will be done, is what that means in Latin.  The words are from the so-called "Lord's Prayer".  The Lord, Christ, in giving this prayer, stated a version of the traditional Kaddish, which exists in several related versions.  Jesus gives his version, not a new prayer.   Here in English is the Kaddish Shalem, the "complete kaddish" -- there are longer special versions for rabbis, mourners, and for after a burial.  Then followed by Jesus' version.

Kaddish Shalem, the "complete Kaddish".

May his great name be exalted and sanctified is God's great name in the world which he created according to his will!  May he establish his kingdom and may his salvation blossom and his anointed be near during your lifetime and during your days and during the lifetimes of all the House of Israel, speedily and very soon.  And say ye, Amen.
May his great name be blessed forever and to all eternity! Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honoured, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be he, above and beyond all blessings, hymns, praises and consolations that are uttered in the world!  And say ye, Amen.
(The Hatzi Kaddish, or "half Kaddish", ends here.  All versions begin with it.)
May the prayers and supplications of all Israel be accepted by their Father who is in heaven.  And say ye, Amen.
May there be abundant peace from heaven, life, satisfaction, help, comfort, refuge, healing, redemption, forgiveness, atonement, relief and salvation for us and for all his people Israel.  And say ye, Amen.
May he who makes peace in his high places grant peace upon us and upon all Israel.  And say ye, Amen.

Jesus' Kaddish, the Our Father.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.  Amen.

Now, Jesus gave his version of the Kaddish when his followers asked him to give them a special prayer like all the other great teachers seem to do.  Just as Moses asked God for his name like all gods have names in our experience.  And just as God gave no new name, Jesus didn't give them a new, special prayer.  He gave them a succinct version of what they already had!  His point being, besides the prayer itself, that no such carryings-on are needed before God.  And, if this is from the anointed who is prayed for -- that is what "Christ" means, the anointed one of God -- then who better to refine and focus it for our use!

Our point here though is the prayer itself and the matter of will, and whose will, ours or God's.  Voluntas, the Latin word for will, is the basis of the English word voluntary.  Voluntary means according to one's will, willing.  Which means there is a choice involved, it is a matter that is neither inevitable nor compelled.  This is exactly what Genesis reveals to us about everything, the universe.  It exists not by some historical inevitability or by an inherent following of impersonal laws, but by the will of a being, God.

In all its stages, the act of creation is spoken of in Genesis as an act of will, voluntary -- let there be, etc.  Except, and this is key, in the last stage, Man.  This is not spoken of as "Let there be Man", but rather, "let us make Man in our own image".  The creation of Man as a being in the image of God, then, is related differently than all the creation before it.  This voluntary, willed, creation culminates in the emergence of a being who himself is endowed with the capacity for voluntary, willed action.  This being, the human being, marks the entry into the unfolding of creation of a created being who himself creates, not out of nature or instinct, but voluntarily, willed, like his creator.  Man is conscious.

Which is both our glory, and our problem.  Our consciousness contains, unlike anything else in creation, the capacity for acts of will that are conscious, which is to say, self-conscious, not in the usual conversational sense, but in the sense that we are conscious of our capacity and the choices we can make.  Which is why it is not until this point in the evolution, the unfolding, of creation that God gives a commandment.  Up until this point he doesn't need to, since nothing in creation until this point has this capacity for willed action that is conscious of itself.  But Man, which the text makes clear is comprised of both male and female, is in the image of God, but is not God.  Or, if you will, this creature is in the image of the creator but is not the creator.  Therefore, the creator, or, if you will, God, gives this creature directions.

Be fruitful and multiply.  This is the first commandment (mitzvah) given to Man; the first of the 613 mitzvoth in the Law (id est, the Law of Moses, the first five books of the Bible).  This is more than a commandment to reproduce.  The animals reproduce, even care for their young for a time, by nature and instinct, and need no such direction.  So why give it to Man?  Because Man is to make a home, raise a family, and, subdue the earth.  Man is a part of creation, but apart from the rest of creation; no other part of creation is told to subdue the earth because no other part of creation could be told to subdue the earth.  Only Man, with the divine-like capacity for self-conscious willed action, could be told this.

Who Told Thee Thou Wast Naked?

And what are the results of this command?  What results has this uniquely self-conscious will-endowed creature produced in subduing the creation of which he is both part and its crown?  The results are everywhere to be seen in both the present and in history -- and in the first chapters of Genesis.  The creation of Man is different than the creation of everything else.  We saw that in the first creation account (chapter one) it is not "let there be ..." like the earlier parts of creation but "let us make ..."  And in the second creation account (chapter two), this point is made again.  God formed Man, in this chapter the male.  The Hebrew verb, yatzar, as is often commented, relates to a potter forming clay.  What is not so often commented is that this verb is written differently regarding the formation of Man than the formation of prior creation.  With animals it is written with one yod, but for the formation of Man it is written with two.

Which fits exactly.  This creature, Man, has something the others do not,  namely the image of God, which means a capacity for acts of self-conscious will.  But this is still a creature, not another god.  Therefore the formation is written with two yods, because Man is torn within himself and needs "commandments", needs direction from his creator.  Of himself, his will may not be God's will.  He has a Yetzer tob, a good inclination, and a Yetzer ra, a bad inclination.  And this condition is dealt with, as God directs Man not to be his own arbiter of good and bad, good and evil.

This is the essence of the human condition -- a being in the divine image who can will acts apart from the will of the Divine who created him.  The man is told, in the figure of tending a garden, which is to say, subduing the earth, that he may do it all, except, decide for himself what is good and what is bad, what is good and what is evil.  This is God's function alone.  For Man to assume that function, to become morally autonomous from God, is the creature assuming the role of the creator.  Which in a word, is pride.  And indeed, pride goeth before the fall.

And that is exactly what happens in the Genesis story.  Once Man assumed moral autonomy from God, ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, so to speak, everything falls apart.  When the unfolding, the evolution, described in Genesis, gets to Man, its continuation becomes voluntary, literally, a matter of will, and the will is now Man's, not God's.

Having assumed moral autonomy, acting like God when he is not god, the creature acting as if he were the creator, Man gets it wrong.  Whereas they were not ashamed at their nakedness before each other, in fact did not distinguish nakedness at all, now they find it an issue.  It is not that there is nakedness, and having eaten of the forbidden fruit, now they realise it.  It is that, having claimed moral autonomy, acting like God, they define good from evil, and find something that is in fact good, evil, and devise measures to correct it -- to correct what is already correct.

This changes everything.  Now, when they sense the presence of the Lord, instead of creatures happily welcoming their creator, they hide!  So instead of the creature seeking his creator, the creator now seeks his creature.  "Where art thou?"  And the man starts making excuses -- oh well hey, I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid from you.  Just a sec, lemme put something on.  We don't have any clothing stores yet, but we sewed these fig leaves to-gether.

And God asks them, What's up with that?  Where'd you get this "naked" thing because I didn't say bupkis about it, let alone opening a clothing store.  And the sorry story continues.  Does the man say, Sorry God I blew it.  Hell no, he blames his wife.  So God asks her, and what does she do?  Same thing, does not accept responsibility for her action but blames something else, the serpent, as Genesis puts it, or diminished capacity, as she would put it now.

Genesis describes exactly what is observed in human history down to the present.  It's not that we try to get it right and fail, it's that we decide what is right and try to get that.  And the results are mixed.  For example, as Man begins to live more in cities, he finds he has a pollution problem with all the horses defecating all over town.  Then he invents another work vehicle that doesn't need horses, a horseless carriage.  Problem solved!  Except, problem not solved, as he discovers later on the fuel emissions from his horseless carriage create an even worse pollution.  Or, for example, as he subdues the earth and attains the ability to harness the power of the atom, he finds a limitless source of power, yet, should there be an accident, the results are disastrous, and, he can also use that power to either create weapons in which thousands are killed in an instant, or, to understand and treat disease at a fundamental level.

And when things go wrong, we do just as Adam and Eve, the story describes our behaviour exactly; we start blaming someone or something else, rather than recognise our own failure.

Memento mori.

Remember that you will die.  That's what the Latin means.  It comes from the triumphal processions in ancient Rome, where as the conquering general as he rode in his chariot through the throngs of cheers and accolades, his servant behind him would keep saying to him, Remember that you will die.  The idea was to not get carried away with all the pomp and circumstance and remember that even though you have gotten this by your accomplishments, you will die like any other man.

Death.  We know we are going to die, and we don't like to think about it very much, yet we do because it happens to those around us and we know it will happen to us.  Death is first mentioned in the Bible here in Genesis, in connexion with the command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  In the day you eat of it you will surely die, God says to Man.

No you won't, says the "serpent".  In fact, you will not only not die, you will become like God, he adds.  So Man eats of the fruit, and guess what -- he does not die!  So the "serpent" was right and the Bible even bears that out?  What's up with that?  Or with this -- does the Bible contradict itself even on its own terms right in its first pages, first saying God tells them they will die in the day they eat the fruit, then saying they don't?  If so, why bother with it then?

OK.  Manifestly, physical death did not enter creation with this original sin.  For one thing, to threaten a consequence which does not exist and of which therefore Man has no knowledge would be meaningless to Man.  For another, as we saw Man eats and does not die.  Something else happens instead that is "death".  For another, nothing in the preceding text gives any basis for thinking creation was meant to be eternal from creation on.  For yet another, a few verses later God becomes concerned that Man, having eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and having become like God -- having declared his moral autonomy and now functioning like a god instead of a creature -- will now eat of the fruit of the tree of eternal life and live forever.  If he were not already going to die at some point, it would be meaningless for God to be concerned that he won't die at some point.

So, the death spoken of is not physical death, it is the something else that happens.  And what is that something else?  The order of creation is broken.  Man is not going to function as he was created to function.  Since he is going to follow his own will, make his own choices, determine what is good and evil, he will have trouble in fulfilling his commandment.  Subduing the earth will be difficult, and so will being fruitful and multiplying.  Just as Scripture says, Man does not experience physical death from his sin, he experiences the death of the order of creation as it was intended, including the death of his role in it.  IOW, spiritual death, and I don't mean "spiritual" in some vague general "spirituality" but literally; his spirit dies and Man will henceforward have broken that image of God in which he was created.

It's still there, but it is broken, and it cannot repair itself.  Or better, a spirit, having been alive, is now dead and cannot bring itself back to life again.  The consequence for assuming moral autonomy from God is -- assuming moral autonomy from God, which shatters the image of God in which he was created and kills his spirit.

Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.  

Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.  That's what the Latin means.  It expands on the Roman memento mori.  It is from the service for the beginning of Lent, called Ash Wednesday, from the custom of imposing ashes on the foreheads of the faithful in the shape of a cross.

Hey, when you gonna talk about Adam?  OK, now.  Adam, the word for the creature, comes from the word for the "dust" or soil from which he was formed, adamah.  When "Adam" is first used (1:27) it is not as a name, a proper noun, for one man.  It means Man, both male and female, and not just one male and one female.  It becomes a personal name in the next chapter (2:7).  And Adam names his wife Eve, Havvah in Hebrew, from hayah, to live, as no human lives who is not born of "woman".  The collective use rather than reference to one person returns in Genesis 5:1-2, where the collective Man is specified by sex, male and female.  Adam is Man.

Huh?  So whaddawe got here, two conflicting accounts?  Sure looks that way, and not just re Adam either.  Looks like in one account a male human was created, then all the animals, not before humans as in the other account, and since none of them was a suitable partner for the male, a female was created from the male.  Biblical scholarship generally posits two sources that were combined by a later editor for the book as we know it now.  So then what?  Dismiss Genesis as a combination of two related but separate creation myths, is that what Past Elder is saying here as his professors taught?  No, and hell no.  It doesn't even matter whether that literary theory is true or not, because it does not change what God is revealing to Man.

Just as with creation itself, the revelation is not a treatise from God on HOW he did it, but a revelation THAT he did it, and communicated in terms comprehensible to Man at the time of its revelation.  Not a textbook, not an algorithm, but a user's manual, a vademecum.

And here again, the creation of Man is different than the creation of everything else.  Not a Let There Be but a Let Us Make.  Unlike everything else, Man is revealed as created from something that already exists, dust.  The crown of creation is himself created from Creation.  This act of creation Genesis calls formation.  Man is related as formed from something that already exists, dust.

O felix culpa.

So, the appearance of a self-conscious being capable of voluntary acts of will marks a fundamental change in the unfolding, the evolution, described in Genesis.  We saw this in four ways:

One, the divine act of will is not "Let there be ..." but "Let us make ...".
Two, the Hebrew verb is written here with two yods instead of one, indicating that this creature's will is his, which may or may not align with God's.
Three, after this creature emerges, commandments are given for the first time, since no other creature needs them.
Four, this creature unfolds not from nothing, but from existing Creation.

And then, this product of a fundamental change fundamentally changes how the unfolding unfolds, so that it is now no longer unfolding according to the will of God, or if you will, so to speak, according to its nature.

What?  What kind of God is this?  Is God then a creator who creates a creature who can fail then says "Here you go, follow the directions"?  And, if this God is all knowing, he knows the creature will fail.  If this God is so great and loving, why didn't he create Man so he could not fail, why not create a creature that is happy and stays that way, including, not die? 

O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem.  O happy fault which gained us such and so great a Redeemer.  That's what the Latin means.  It's the famous verse of the Exultet (more recently given by the ever-changing but oh-no-nothing-really-changed Roman Catholic Church as Exsultet), a sung poem of praise, though not sung by a praise band, at the Easter Vigil after the procession with the Easter Candle.  Though one will search in vain for this verse in the cobbled up version of the Exultet offered in Lutheran Service Book.  Why its most famous phrase was cobbled out of it remains one of the enduring quirks of LSB, but I digress.

It comes down to this.  All the storm and stress about Creation and Evolution etc is just unnecessary, and fuelled by nothing but misunderstanding and fear.  Genesis presents the unfolding of God's creativity and that is evolution. The unfolding is laid out with utter precision in the succession of geosphere, biosphere, then noosphere.  And with the emergence of the noosphere, a new aspect enters creation, a being, Adam, who is distinct from the rest of creation in having the image of the Creator but distinct from the Creator in not being a god himself.  His participation in the continuing unfolding, which is to say, evolution, is literally voluntary, subject to his will, and he blows it, shattering the image of his Creator he bears beyond repair through his own will.

This is exactly what the "creationists" and the "evolutionists" both miss, with opposite yet similar consequences.  The "creationists" assert creation by God, the "evolutionists" assert evolution, and both are right.

The evolutionist misses two things.  One, that evolution is not a push, but a pull, not an impersonal push of natural law or chance, but an intended personal pull exerted by a Being we usually call God.  Two, with the emergence of Man, co-operation and participation in the pull becomes voluntary and is thwarted by Man's own voluntas, will.  The origin of the species is not the origin of life; there is nothing to fear here.

The creationist misses that in Scripture God is not writing a scientific treatise or algorithm of how he did creation, but a revelation that he did creation.  Meaning that our understanding of the "how" of creation is no more to be made into a god, into the basis for our self-understanding, than more obvious forces such as thunder, our sun, etc were to be made into gods in earlier times.  The origin of the species is not the origin of life and not the origin of everything; there is nothing to fear here.

For as in Adam all die so in Christ are all made alive, it says.  And so it is -- in Adam, Man, we men (don't get goofy here, it means male and female) lose the image of our creator and lose any ability despite our best efforts to successfully co-operate and participate in the unfolding, the evolution, God has begun.  Yet, the emergence of such a being, Man, cannot be otherwise -- an unfolding into increasing complexity, from geosphere to biosphere to noosphere, will with the emergence of the noosphere become voluntary, a matter of will.  The cruel God would be not one who creates it so, but one who just leaves it so.

But God does not leave it so.  Nor is there a general "theistic evolution".  Rather, this theos, this God, reveals that he turns this fault, this inevitable voluntariness, without which Man would not have the image of God but simply be an android rather than an anthropos, into a happy fault, by himself becoming Man so that the evolution may continue, the pull continues not by the efforts of Man's will but by faith in the assumption by God the Creator of the brokenness of His own image in the creature.  THIS is who dies as a result of assuming willed control over good and evil -- not Man, but God become Man in Christ!

Now that's something to exult -- should we now spell it exsult, Rome? -- about, just as the Exultet says.  The Creator is creation's Redeemer too!  Such and so great a redeemer indeed!  I make all things new, he says.  Not just all people, all creation.  Ich mache alles -- nicht nur alle -- neu.  The pull of evolution revealed in Genesis is restored in the cross of Christ, he who was God made Man, and when lifted up in the cross suffered the death that is our consequence so that we might regain the image of God which was intended, willed, by God.

And not only that.  There's more!  Not something else, but more to this same something.  That sacrifice of God on behalf of Man in Christ, is not just words in a book, or something that happened a long time ago, but it is offered to us here and now!  In the Divine Setting -- which is to say, the universe -- precisely because there is no universal such as a 24 hour day, a disruption in the ordinary operation of matter, such as say a resurrection, also is a disruption in the ordinary operation of time.  Therefore, that one sacrifice, that one lifting up of Christ on the cross drawing all men to himself, which is to God that sacrifice of his body and blood, is given to us outside the normal operation of time and matter, in, with, and under the elements he instituted of bread and the fruit of the vine (vine being a grapevine).  The sure pledge of our salvation and redemption!

Et ego si exaltatus fuero a terra omnia traham ad me ipsum. 

And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.  (In case you forgot.)

The "literal meaning" of Genesis has absolutely nothing, nothing, to do with creation in six twenty-four hour earth days, nor with a single first human named Adam being made from dust.  AND, the fact that creation did not happen in six twenty-four hour earth days and that Man did not descend from two individuals named Adam and Eve in no way, no way, overthrows the literal meaning of Genesis or proves either Genesis specifically or the Bible generally false and/or irrelevant.

In fact, what God revealed to Man in Bereshit (that's Genesis, in case you forgot) in terms of Man's experience at the time and place it was revealed, is confirmed over and over again by the astounding harvest of knowledge resulting from our empirically based view of the world that is now our experience.  The phenomenon of Man, the human phenomenon, is nowhere presented more exactly than Bereshit, as we have discussed above.

Why then fear or repudiate the progress of the world?  Why multiply warnings and prohibitions, as if there were nothing more to venture or to learn?  Nihil intentatum (Nothing unattempted).  All over the world, Man yields an astounding harvest, in laboratories, in studios, in factories, wherever he labours.  Embrace it, since without the sun revealed in Scripture, this astounding harvest disperses wildly into sterile shoots, and this vast crucible would never learn its source and destiny in the crux (cross) of the Creator incarnate in Man who overcomes all and when exalted, that is, lifted up, on the cross draws all to himself.

The divine setting.