Saw a Rainbow the Other Day

So the post on Noah generated a lot of interest, and I thought I should follow it all up with just a few comments. Many thanks for all the responses and interaction. I have three points to make in response.

The first has to do with what some identify as “off the trail” opinions, and should we really be talking about this kind of thing, and doesn’t this present unnecessary obstacles to faith? I mean, what if intelligent nonbelievers discover that we think the Flood was caused by sexual intercourse between celestials and humans? Won’t they go ho ho ho at us? Sure they will. But they will also do that same thing when we talk about marvels that are even more staggering — like God becoming a man, or the resurrection of Jesus. Our task in presenting the faith to unbelievers is not to insert as much “reasonable” unbelief into the faith as we can get away with. There is no vaccine for unbelief — and so we shouldn’t give them little bits of unbelief to inoculate them against big time unbelief. The world doesn’t get healthy that way; the church gets sickly that way.

That doesn’t make any given weird interpretation true, obviously, but it does mean that we must not let the world cool shame us into what is acceptable to believe. The whole thing is a matter of exegesis. A good example of the right kind of textual interaction would be Jeremy Sexton’s comment near the end of that previous thread, even though I still differ. But we should always be asking what the text says and not what the world will applaud.

The second point is this. In many ways, this discussion shows the success of the gospel in transforming the world. On a general scale, we no longer remember what the world back then was actually like, and I do not say this to fault anyone. This is a promised blessing, actually. “For I will take away the names of Baalim out of her mouth, and they shall no more be remembered by their name” (Hos. 2:17).

But there is still some remembrance. For those well read in classical literature, one of the most glaring features of the ancient mindset is the prospect of human women getting chased by randy gods. Take Ovid, for just one example. It was the birth of the modern era that gave rise to the idea that this understanding belonged in the same category as kitchen elves, ghosts in the attic, and things that go bump in the night. But the mindset of modernity does not share the background cosmological assumptions that governed the ancient world — biblical and pagan alike. Lest anyone freak out over this proposed syncretism of mine, let me remind everyone that all truth is God’s truth, which should not be taken as meaning that all post-Newton truth is God’s truth.

So what we find laughable did not become laughable until the sixteenth century, A.D. That was, in part, the blessing of God, but the original thought forms of the ancient world remain what they were, for all that. For the careful exegete, that has to be reckoned with.

The gospel overthrew two things. One was petty superstitions, and good riddance to them. People were freed from slavish practices that never had any substance to them. Caesar Augustus, for example, was very superstitious about what shoe he put on first in the morning. But the world was also freed from the principalities and powers, which had real existence. Nothing is plainer than the different terminology that covenant people used to describe realities that the pagans would also describe. What we would call demons, the pagans would call gods. Different nouns, same realities. Paul says that those who sacrifice in the temples to the gods are actually sacrificing to demons (1 Cor. 10:20). And a couple chapters earlier, he states the whole thing explicitly:

“For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,) but to us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him” (1 Cor. 8:5-6).

Sometimes the Scripture even identifies a particular god. When Paul cast out the demon from the slave girl in Philippi, that wrecked her ability to tell fortunes. She hadn’t been faking it, in other words. She really did have a familiar spirit. But Luke plainly identifies her demon as the “spirit of a python.” So what is with that? According to pagan myth, the god Apollo came down to Delphi and killed a giant python there. The place became sacred to him, and the priestess there, the oracle at Delphi, was known as the pythoness. Now, Paul comes to Philippi, just over three hundred miles from Delphi, and finds a girl possessed by the spirit of a python. Nothing is plainer than that she was a devotee of Apollo, and that she had genuine spiritual powers. But what was divine for the pagans was demonism to the believers.

Here is another example of something that could happen in the biblical cosmology and also in the ancient pagan cosmology, but not in the modernist pagan cosmology — the star of Bethlehem. Remember that, according to the biblical account, a star came down into our atmosphere and pointed out a particular house to the wise men. “No, no, take the second left.” Take that, Carl Sagan! Take that, Peter Enns! Has a maidenly blush colored our evangelical cheeks yet?

The third point has to do with angelic capacities. Our idea of angels as “pure spirit” is actually more beholden to the debates of medieval schoolmen, who in debating whether angels had corporeal bodies would famously debate how many of them could fit on the head of a pin. That was what that debate was about.

But whether angels are embodied creatures in their very nature is a secondary matter. Nothing is plainer in Scripture than that angels can certainly take on bodies in pursuit of their assigned tasks. They consistently appear as men (Luke 24:4). We could entertain them at table without knowing it (Heb. 13:2). Yes, but could they beget any children? Well, another attribute of angels that we should not neglect is their intelligence. We somehow assume that any genetic monstrosities from the ancient world would have to have been crudely accomplished, the way we imagine Pasiphae managed to conceive the Minotaur with her mating contraption. But we live in an era of genetic manipulation. We are on the threshold of cloning human beings. We are talking seriously about robo-sex — something that C.S. Lewis prophetically tagged in That Hideous Strength. What makes us think that angelic powers couldn’t know anything about genetic manipulation? If this kind of thing is something we are on the brink of doing, and so why could not this have been done before? Why do we assume that angelic knowledge is tethered to human scientific advancement?

And even with that said, we have to remember that human scientific accomplishment has had an ebb and flow to it. The ancient world contained many examples of staggering genius, and we do ourselves a disservice when we automatically underestimate them. They were not nearly as chronologically provincial as we are.

This should actually sober us up a bit. The New Testament presents the generation of Noah to us as a bad example, and we are not to follow it. But in order to do this rightly we need to know what it is they did that was so bad. Why did God destroy the world? Too many parties? Cheating at cards? Too much credit card debt? No, I think they were all Nietzschians, only without the pencil neck and compensatory mustache. They wanted to build the Superman; the antediluvians were postmoderns.

If we had a time machine, and wanted to send someone back who would fit right in, I would nominate Heidegger. If we wanted to send someone back who wouldn’t fit in at all, and who would be the ninth person on the ark, I would suggest John Knox.

And yet the modern church is afflicted, yet again, with the same kind of pomo-lust for protean flesh. We would do the whole Flood thing all over again if there were only grants attached from the National Science Foundation, and all the cool kids were urging it. Good thing we have a promise. Saw a rainbow the other day.