Abraham

James Wynn · 12 Apr 2005, 08:53 · from 2005-April.txt.gz

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From: thewynns at earthlink.net (James Wynn)
Date: Tue Apr 12 08:53:41 2005
Subject: (urth) Abraham
References: <20050411222151.93528.qmail at web54402.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <003201c53f77$bb5f72e0$60a3f63f@wynnhouse>

>>>Blattid wrote:
>>>It isn't small in Christian theology either, of course, with the
>>>sacrifice of a miraculously-born son being a "type" of the Father's
>>>sacrifice of His Son.
>>
>> Crush wrote:
>>Who has a ram provided by God sacrificed in his place. In Christian
>>theology, Isaac is a "type" for the Christ *and* mankind. The story is
>>literally stewing in available Christian symbolism.  Just the sort of
>>overloading of symbolism that Wolfe is so keen on.

Nathan wrote:
>I'm with you.  But for those who believe in the story literally, or even
>those who look to Biblical story as templates for their own actions,
>the fact that it is symbolic of later events doesn't change the facts of
>the almost-sacrifice of Isaac itself.  In other words, God wouldn't
>have acted this way, or even told such a story, in order to simply
>illustrate a future event.  The actions of the
> story also have to be consistent with the way God behaves, right?

Sure they have to be consistent.
God didn't have Abraham perform a human sacrifice; he only asked Abraham to
show that he WOULD...that the gift was not more precious to him than the
Giver. That Pharisee the Apostle Paul asserted that Abraham himself did not
believe that Isaac would be ultimately murdered because of God's promise. He
said Abraham believed that God would raise Isaac from the dead (more
Christian imagery). Since God did not permit a human sacrifice, I don't see
anything inconsistent to his stated nature.

A historical reading of the text does not preclude the typological reading.
Much to the contrary, those who read it historically ALL read it JUST
like the woman in tBotNS who said "the reason
things were made so was so the cathedral would rise just like it did...the
Hand in nature."

Those who read the story as an historical event believe God did what he did
with Abraham to reveal Himself to him personally but they believe that at
the same time God had his eye to a larger audience. He didn't *have* to
do it they way he did with the sacrifice but He opted to to place Abraham
unwittingly on a stage with the future generations in the audience. Thus
(they say) God had Abraham go through a test, the results of which He
already knew the outcome since He knew Abraham's thoughts and heart. In
Numbers, He sends snakes to bite rebellious Israelites and has Moses
make a graven image (talk about your inconsistencies)...a bronze serpent...
and lift it on a pole so that whoever looked at it would be healed.
He does this even though He could have healed them directly in order
to present an image of Christ's crucifixion and his "becoming sin for us".
In Deuteronomy, He punished Moses for striking a rock with his staff
instead of talking to it with the seemingly arbitrarily severe (yet, they
would say, entirely just) punishment of denying him access to the
Promised Land to show that the Law could take the Jews only so
far and they would need Joshua (the same name as Jesus [Y'shua])
to lead them out of the wilderness of Zin (possibly phonetically
indistinguishable from "sin"). I'm not prepared to
prove it, but I suspect typological reading of the Bible is something
Christians inherited from the Jews.

This is just like the way Wolfe presents rationalizations for Christian
mysteries (such as the Trinity) within SF stories that have nothing
ostensibly to do with the Bible, Jesus, etc.

~ Crush

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