Musing on Something Dr. James McGrath Said.

Last updated on: April 21, 2015 at 12:13 pm by Michael Hardin

Musing on Something Dr. James McGrath Said. 2015-04-21T12:13:53-04:00 Michael Hardin

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“If there is a core principle about marriage in the Bible, it is arguably that found in Genesis 2. It is a story which Jesus recognized for what it is, a non-literal depiction of marriage. The story is literally about one person becoming two, but it explicitly states that it is symbolic and is really about two people becoming one.”

~ Dr. James McGrath

Brilliant observation which caused me to do a little reflective thinking about reading Genesis 1-6 in terms of a mimetic anthropology
While Dr. McGrath sees companionship here as the goal of the “two becoming one” (and thus positive mimesis), it is how the couple become one in a bent and fallen way (through mediated desire a la Rene Girard) that is the explanation of the text in Genesis 3. Which leads to the formation of human culture in blood in Genesis 4.

Thus:

Genesis 1 ** The Enuma Elish** Creation is Nonviolent, a Temple without Blood (Based on the work of Margaret Barker [Temple Theology] and John Walter [The Lost World of Genesis 1] where this narrative structures the cosmos from the outside in as a ‘temple’, with humanity standing just outside the center of the Temple which is the sabbath.)

Genesis 2 The Purpose of Human Companionship in relation to the Creator (yet this text presupposes the victimage mechanism in the prohibition. The point of this text is that the capacity to judge, to discriminate, to differentiate belongs only to God. Humans learn this through ritual sacrifice. )

Genesis 3 The Couple Unite through mediated Desire (the couple and the snake form the three parts of the mimetic triangle so illumined by Girard. Note already how sacrifice enters the text with God participating in the scapegoat mechanism. ‘God’ has turned into the Janus-faced deity [God both ‘clothes’ humans presumably with the skin of a ‘sacrificial’ (?) animal and engages in expulsion]. Yet even here this text is a mixed text and one can read this text also as a revelatory text about God’s grace (the promise of a redeemer (? in Gen 3:15), and the expulsion as grace so humans would not remain for ever in a state of mimetic brokenness by eating of the Tree of Life (which would then become for them a Tree of Perpetual Death. Original sin is not pride, it is poor mirroring.

Genesis 3 is THE text that for the first time juxtaposes ‘violence’ and the ‘sacred’ (or as Girard says “violence is the sacred”).

Genesis 4 Sacrifice and Culture ** Oedipus, Romulus and Remus in Livy** This text is a rich text from the perspective of mimetic anthropology for here sacrifice (religion) is that which begins a differentiation process which leads to the formation of human culture (Cain went out and built a ‘city’). As Girard says, “religion is the mother of culture.” I could write pages about this text (and have!). Of course you also have the escalation of violence theme (and the problem of reciprocal vengeance as THE quintessential human problem) in Lamech.

Gen 6 Crisis and Resolution This will lead to the crisis of ‘the monstrous double (the nephilim in 6:1-4) and the Mutually Assured Destruction (Hobbes: “the war of all against all”) that is happening in the hominization process (or how we humans do this thing called ‘human’). Then comes the Flood (which is not just an act of vengeance by the divinity, but is also an act of grace [where we would expect just a one sided act of vengeance of the gods for humanity screwing things up]).

Oh, I could go on and on. See how rich these texts are with meaning! See how by contrasting them with ancient founding murder myths and myths of cultural origin we can see how revelatory they are of the problem of victimizing and also how they show us the shift in Gen 1 of God as Nonviolent to the projection of scapegoating and violence onto the divinity (Gen 2-11). This is a powerful text, an extraordinary myth.

Those who somehow need a literal man and a literal woman and a talking snake really miss out on what the text is really trying to get us to see or actually ‘unsee’ in order to see. Their fear of evolution as a scientific metaphor for explaining all creation (See Ilia Delio’s The Unbearable Wholeness of Being) is unwarranted both scientifically, but more important from a biblical perspective. Literalist readers of Genesis 1-11 have to do such incredible hermeneutical gymnastics, deny the validity of modern science, bury their heads in archaic worldviews. Little wonder that their Christian anthropology is in a shambles. We have never really gotten past Origen and Augustine. It is time to leave behind this Platonist anthropology which denies any reality to ‘acquisitive mimesis’ (so Girard) and perhaps (if we are lucky) really reconfigure the thrust of the Platonic heritage on 2,000 years of both Eastern and Western theology. That’s a story for another day though.

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