Thursday, April 4, 2019

Divine Embodiment in Jewish Antiquity: Rediscovering The Jewishness of John’s Incarnate Christ - a doctoral dissertation


Beginning with my January 20, 2019 post (link), I began to explore the issue of divine embodiment, creating a new LABEL—Corporeality and God— specifically for the topic (link). This post will be the sixth contribution included under that label/topic.

The first five threads concerning 'Corporeality and God' have to date elicited 99 comments. I suspect/hope that the dissertation I am about to introduce will stimulate some continued interest and discussion on this topic.

It was just a few days ago that I discovered Deborah L. Forger's 2017 doctoral dissertation— Divine Embodiment in Jewish Antiquity: Rediscovering The Jewishness of John’s Incarnate Christ—whilst engaged in online research (PDF). The following excerpts will serve as an introduction to this engaging and thought provoking contribution:

At the heart of this dissertation is my definition of the notion of divine embodiment. Divine embodiment for my purposes encompasses a wide variety of ways in which an aspect, or attribute, or personification of Israel’s supreme God enters into the created world, though much of my work centers on how these manifestations became localized or mediated through humans. These entities are not synonymous with Israel’s supreme deity, but they participate in the divinity of that ineffable and uncreated One, and thereby can also be considered divine. As a close corollary, I define human apotheosis as instances in which created humans, or human-like figures, either undergo the process of deification or are presented as being divine themselves. These figures, though created, also participate in the divinity of Israel’s supreme deity, and thus can also be considered divine.

Throughout this dissertation I intentionally employ the phrase “divine embodiment,” instead of “God’s embodiment” or “incarnation.” With respect to the notion of “God’s embodiment,” I draw a distinction between the words God and divine, because although Jews had a conceptualization of one supreme God who was uncreated himself, there were many other entities that could participate in that high God’s divinity and thereby be conceived of as divine as well. (Pages 8,  9)

A bit later we read:

...I suggest that within the period of Jewish Antiquity which I investigate, there were a number of ways that the “divine” could became “embodied,” and thus the notion of incarnation emerged out of the matrix of and not as a significant deviation from, other Jewish thought. Specifically, I claim that the description found in John 1:14 that the divine word became flesh (ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο) was just one of the many ways that Jews in the early centuries of the Common Era understood that God, or an aspect of God, was embodied, or took on a corporeal form. Thus, in the first century CE, both immediately before and in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple, the notion of divine embodiment was not antithetical to Jewish religious thought, but rather integral to it. (Page 13)

And:

The primary question that I ask throughout this dissertation is why it is at this particular time in Jewish history that so many Jewish texts present a manner by which God can become embodied or humans can become deified. I do not assume that the authors of these texts necessarily knew one another. Nor do I claim that they were dependent upon one another. What I do observe, however, is the wide variety of ways that Jews in this period thought about how God and humanity could be connected through embodiment. Thus, though I posit a number of different ways that first-century Jews conceived of divine embodiment, I demonstrate how the Gospel of John’s description of this phenomenon both stands in continuity with other Jewish descriptions and is distinct from them as well. (Page 44)

Forger has cogently, and importantly, identified that more than one interpretation of what divine embodiment entailed was in existence during the life of Jesus Christ, and the subsequent emergence of Christianity as new religion. Forger also advances a somewhat provocative understanding of the term 'monotheism'; a term which is inextricably related to the issue of divine embodiment—note the following:

My dissertation makes this argument in three primary parts. In the first part, which also comprises chapter two, I re-contextualize one pivotal term—namely, the notion of ancient Jewish monotheism—with respect to my broader investigation of divine embodiment in the Second Temple Period. Such re-contextualization enables me to move past debates that have stymied progress in this arena, particularly the question of how early Christians, who were Jewish monotheists themselves, could have believed in a Jesus who was also divine. Wouldn’t that move have implied a step towards ditheism? My work in this chapter complicates and ultimately dismantles this assumption from two primary perspectives: First, I challenge the appropriateness of the term “monotheism” to describe Jewish belief during this period by showing that “monotheism” and its derived adjective “monotheistic” did not exist in antiquity. It was only in the midst of seventeenth-century CE philosophical debates that Henry Moore first coined the term. To impose it onto the ideological imagination of Jews living in the first-century CE is anachronistic and does not fully encapsulate the complexity of ancient Jewish beliefs about God. Second, I suggest that to use descriptors of a supreme uncreated God from whom all other reality flows is a better way of conceiving of God in the Second Temple Period, because this is the language that ancient Jews actually employed when describing God. I argue that though Jewish monotheism did not exist per se, since ancient Jews conceived of the oneness of the godhead in a complex and hierarchical manner, they did understand there to be a clear separation between the one uncreated God and all other reality. (Page 47)

Before ending this introduction to Forger's dissertation, I would like point out one more important aspect directly related to the issue of divine embodiment: the development of doctrine. Forger's contribution clearly demonstrates that the 'traditional' understanding of divine embodiment—contra the competing Stoic and cruder anthropomorphic views—emerged within a Jewish matrix, rather than a Hellenistic one.

Looking forward to further discussion on these important topics...


Grace and peace,

David

3 comments:

leeseykay said...

Hi Dave.

I found a blog entry that might interest you and anyone who would take an interest in the subject of doctrinal development. According to a couple of authors at ldsphilosopher.com there exists serious conflict between what they call "absolutism" and a correct way of understanding fluid ideas that used to be true but are no longer.

The title of this entry is "Can the teachings of the Church ever change?" with a subheading "ABSOLUTISM VS. ONGOING REVELATION". Following is how it begins:

"Many believe that if Church teachings or emphases changes over time, this is a signal that the Church is no longer being lead by divinely chosen servants, or that obedience to the unchanging will of God is being abandoned for more human purposes. Because they are true, it is argued, the teachings and practices of the Church must remain without internal contradictions of any kind. This sort of absolutism typically stems from the belief that truth is a set of ideas that never changes, and that God can never contradict or alter prior teachings or instructions." (emphasis mine)

I am wondering why they conflate instructions with teachings. Who thinks that the Church lacks authority to legislate its own discipline? I suspect it is to soften the blow which would be felt if they simply asked if it is okay for God to contradict prior teachings.

The whole piece seems to me like an exercise in excusing the errors of past prophets in favor of whatever happens to be said today. There is nothing that could prevent any self-contradictory religion from adopting the same method these authors approvingly cite which replaces the authority of the fathers of a religion, with its contemporary heirs who are free to despise what the founder believed.

They speak within the context of an LDS framework, but there is no reason why any religious group that is tired its own founding spirit can't legitimize a new conformation with the spirit of their own contemporary world: "Beware of those who would set up the dead prophets against the living prophets, for the living prophets always take precedence."

Replace the word "prophet" with "pope". Peter (the current pope) can just say that the Church was all messed up for 2,000 years with absolutism. Just follow the pope. Who needs to "develop" doctrine when all that is needed is a condemnation of "absolutism" and "idealotry"? It isn't that far-fetched.

Suppose what these two professional philosophers say is "true" (whatever "true" might mean in context). As regards their "absolutism", it would seem to me that their patron saint might well be Pontius Pilate, when he skeptically asked Jesus Christ, who claimed to be Truth, "What is truth?"

http://www.ldsphilosopher.com/can-church-teachings-ever-change/?fbclid=IwAR1UVmeZdNRV0mK1X6M1sClmAM2aG1Mvy4JbVVHEyXrZlVe0mKoBQd_EFhY

Rory

Rory said...

How does a Latter day Saint, know that the Father will be corporeal tomorrow?

David Waltz said...

Hi Rory,

Thanks much for the link to the web article, and your thoughts on the content therein. As you well know, I have a spent a good deal of time studying the issue of the development of doctrine. To date, I have touched on the subject in 58 threads here at AF. My studies have established two undeniable truisms: first, every ecclesiastical tradition has experienced development (even though many deny this); and second, discerning between doctrines that are 'reformable' and those that are 'irreformable' is rarely a 'black and white' task.

Whether consciously or not, it seems to me that the authors of the web article, "Can the teachings of the Church ever change?", have embraced my two truisms. With that said, I think it is important to point out that while the authors have rejected what they term "Absolutism", I do not think that they have denied that some absolutes exist—i.e. they retain in some real sense the 'reformable' vs. irreformable' distinction. Note the following:

>>This is not to say that we should expect core doctrines to change. Jesus will always be our Savior and Redeemer, the Bible and the Book of Mormon contain a historical record of the words of ancient prophets, mankind will rise to be judged before God in the resurrection, hate and enmity will always be sin and charity and compassion will always be Christlike attributes. However, our understanding of what these basics mean may evolve and grow — in ways that we never expect — as God reveals more through His servants over time.>>

Anyway, just some morning musings on my part. May have more to say later...


Grace and peace,

David