The Self-Disarmament of God as Evolutionary Pre-Adaptation

The Self-Disarmament of God as Evolutionary Pre-Adaptation

JACK MILES

Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXVII (2003)

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Homo sapiens is a self-domesticating species whose aptitude for domesticationis as innate as any other genetic given. Religion, historically, has been a major

form of human self-domestication or acculturation, and myth has been universallya key part of religion. To say even this much is to suggest that change in a majorhuman myth may legitimately be considered under the heading of evolutionaryadaptation in the part of the human species that is affected by the myth. As DavidSloan Wilson writes in Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature ofSociety (University of Chicago Press, 2002):

. . . people who stand outside of religion often regard its seemingly irrationalnature as more interesting and important to explain than its communalnature. Rational thought is treated as the gold standard against which reli-gious belief is found so wanting that it becomes well-nigh inexplicable. Evo-lution causes us to think about the subject in a completely different way.Adaptation becomes the gold standard against which rational thought mustbe measured alongside other modes of thought. In a single stroke, rationalthought becomes necessary but not sufficient to explain the length andbreadth of human mentality, and the so-called irrational features of religioncan be studied respectfully as potential adaptations in their own right ratherthan as idiot relatives of rational thought. (pp. 122–123)

When the Christian revision of Jewish myth is regarded in this way, when it is regarded, namely, as part of “the length and breadth of human mentality”in the process of endless evolution, the revision is problematized in a new way.Rather than ask “Is it true?” or, much less, “Did it happen?” a questioner workingwithin Sloan Wilson’s problematic would ask of this revision “How, if at all, was

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it more adaptive than what preceded it?” or, more loosely, “What was or still is itspoint?”

The Bible—comprising both Christianity’s edition of received Jewish scrip-ture (the Tanakh as edited into the Old Testament) and Christianity’s epilogue toscripture (the New Testament as appended to the Old)—has as its point that Godhas saved humankind from its sins and bestowed upon it the boon of eternal life.To use Milton’s never-surpassed summary of the Christian myth, paradise lost hasbecome paradise regained. Did such an event ever occur? Is it true? Rather thanask these questions, we may prefer to ask in what way it might ever be or havebeen adaptive to tell such a story week after week, year after year, and to assim-ilate it to the point that it could influence everyday behavior. The terms of theclaim—death as punishment and life as reward—are sufficiently close to evolu-tion’s extinction and survival to suggest that the underlying concern is identical orat least related. Assuming that much, the question that comes to the fore is: Fromjust what sins does this alleged salvation save? What is the behavior that the mythintends to proscribe and thereby eradicate or repress? What is the (presumptivelyadaptive) behavior it intends to impose?

Torah, the opening five books of the Bible, imposes the death penalty for along list of offenses, but all of these offenses—even those that seem to refer onlyto relations among human beings—are religious as well as ethical in character.They are understood to constitute infidelity to God if only because God himselfhas given them this meaning. In imposing his covenant on Israel, God presents thechoice between obedience and disobedience to his commandments as, in the mostpersonal way possible, a choice between fidelity and infidelity to himself. To besure, apostasy, the actual worship of another god is the supreme offense and theone most frequently mentioned, but all other offenses are understood to implyapostasy and therefore to be not just unethical but also irreligious. Every sin issimultaneously itself and the sin of disloyalty to or betrayal of God.

Putting theological betrayal into anthropological terms, the meaning of thecovenant is that any unlawful act is a seditious act to the extent that it underminesnational solidarity. When God warns that he will punish the disobedient withdeath, his threat extends, significantly, not just to sinful individual Israelites butalso and even preeminently to Israel as a whole. He has made Israel into a nation,God warns, and he can unmake it at will. Empirically, his statement may be under-stood to mean that without a tribal law commanding the widest and deepest assent,Israel will not survive attacks by its many enemies.

The context, in other words, is endless war. Though famine, pestilence, andplague are all mentioned, war is clearly the preeminent peril. It is from war, aboveall, that God saves whomever he saves and through war that he punishes hisenemies, domestic or foreign. “Natural” disasters do occur at his behest, but the context is almost always military. One need only recall the “ten plagues” ofthe Book of Exodus. Enmity between Israel and its neighbors is expressed mytho-logically as God’s bitter resentment of his divine rivals. Accordingly, if peacebetween God and his rival gods is simply not an option, if he cannot “live and letlive” in the heavenly realm, then Israel must not be more tolerant than he. Thealternatives are victory and defeat. Peaceful accommodation short of either

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extreme is envisioned only rarely and then not as mutual tolerance but only as thevoluntary acknowledgment by Israel’s neighbors of the supremacy and benevo-lence of Israel’s God—the joyous eschatological vision of Isaiah 56 and kindredpassages.

Now, in the conscienceless terms of evolution, war has often been a highlyadaptive behavior. Nations that win their wars tend to survive, and those that losetheirs tend to die out. In the wars that European immigrants to the Americaswaged with the natives, the natives lost, and many of the native nations are nowextinct. The Europeans won, and their proportion of the overall world populationthrough their New World descendants has greatly increased as a result. In the earlyportions of the Old Testament, the wars of Yahweh are seen as wars of this adap-tive sort—wars whose real results are survival and national success in the form ofspectacularly successful reproduction.

Yet war is not always an adaptive behavior.There are Pyrrhic victories.Thereare stalemates that leave both sides ravaged and exhausted. There are wars inwhich everyone loses. There are military uprisings doomed from the start. Howdoes Homo sapiens, the self-domesticating animal, respond to the threat of immi-nent but lethally maladaptive war? One way may be by creating religious myths—myths to which existential rather than merely aesthetic assent is given—in whichGod or the gods eschew violence as the proper resolution of rivalry or as theuniquely adequate response to oppression or the threat of oppression.

In the New Testament, the dissident Jews who founded Christianity at a timeof extreme peril for their nation created such a myth. They did not found a whollynew religion with a new central myth and a new God. Instead, they took the God-story they had inherited and gave its plot a revisionist conclusion by turning itsdivine protagonist from a warrior into a pacifist. The Lamb of God, executed bythe empire he was expected to overthrow, the empire that by the terms of thereceived myth he surely would have overthrown, is a defeat in historical terms.God wins a cosmic victory, to be sure, but the substitution of cosmic for historicvictory makes for a decidedly revisionist tale. Two examples of contrasting textsfrom the Old Testament and the New Testament must suffice to suggest the char-acter of the revision. In passing, it may be observed that an accumulation of jux-tapositions like these had much to do with the transformation of the receivedJewish scriptures from what they were into an Old Testament vis-à-vis the dissi-dents’ emerging New Testament. The process was dialectical: The dissidents saidwhat they were by saying what they were not, and they employed their scriptureto make the distinction.

In 2 Kings 1, Ahaziah, King of Samaria, suffers an accident and sends toinquire of the god Baalzebub whether he will recover. Yahweh, God of Israel, isoffended by this act of homage to a rival god and sends his prophet Elijah torebuke the king.A confrontation ensues between Elijah and a captain in the king’sarmy.

But Elijah answered the captain of fifty: “If I am a man of God, let fire comedown from heaven and consume you and your fifty.” Then the fire of Godcame down from heaven and consumed him and his fifty. (2 Kings 1:12)

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This is ordinarily how Yahweh wins when challenged. In Luke 9:54–55, however,this strategy undergoes the mentioned revision. Jesus’ disciples, James and John,facing religious opponents (in Samaria, just to make the contrast harder to miss)ask their master:

“Lord, do you want us to bid fire come down from heaven and consumethem as Elijah did?” But he turned and rebuked them, and he said, “You donot know what manner of Spirit you are of; for the Son of Man came not todestroy men’s lives but to save them.”

To save them from what, exactly? Perhaps to save them from a mistake. Thishighly self-conscious and highly literary juxtaposition of two instances of religiousrivalry and two different responses to it suggests a comparably self-consciousdetermination to proclaim that violence—perhaps particularly in the name of religion—can be lethally maladaptive. Do thus, Jesus says, and men’s lives will not be saved but destroyed.

A second, more striking example of the same revision involves a famous linefrom St. Paul: “O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?” Afuller citation, in the King James Version familiar to many from Handel’s Messiahwould be:

Behold, I tell you a mystery;We shall not all sleep,But we shall all be changedIn a moment,In the twinkling of an eye,At the last trumpet.

The trumpet shall sound,And the dead shall be raised incorruptible,And we shall be changed.For this corruptibleMust put on incorruptionAnd this mortal must put on immortality.

Then shall be brought to passThe saying that is written:Death is swallowed up in victory.O Death, where is thy sting?O Grave, where is thy victory?The sting of death is sin,And the strength of sin is in the law.But thanks be to God,Who giveth us the victoryThrough our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Cor. 15:51–57)


If the entire Bible, Old and New Testaments combined, were to be reducedto just one word, the word, in my opinion, would be victory. But the nature of thevictory in the Old Testament and in the New Testament differs crucially. In Paul’svision of resurrection to immortality, the victory will not be won until time—thatis, history—has ended. When the trumpet sounds to end history, Christians whohave bound themselves to Christ sacramentally in his death will find themselvesbound to him as well in his glorious resurrection. Their victory and God’s will beover death itself rather than over any one death-dealing human enemy. God willhave achieved this victory for them not by defeating his human enemies but byallowing himself to be defeated by them and then triumphing impersonally overthe defeat itself rather than personally over the enemies who inflicted the defeat.Were it not so, then Christ’s resurrection would be nothing more than a triumphover Pontius Pilate.

The one personal element that does remain in this victory is also cosmicrather than historic. The restoration of human immortality—a gift that God tookback when he cursed Adam and Eve—is God’s final, definitive victory over andrecovery from Satan, whose deception led to that curse and to the blighting ofGod’s creation through all of human history.

Lost in all the excitement of Paul’s language is the plain fact that until Christcame, God had endlessly promised imminent victory over human enemies ratherthan ultimate victory over Satan as the original merchant of death. The pairedapostrophes at the climax of Paul’s prose poem—“O Death, where is thy sting? OGrave, where is thy victory?”—are lines from the prophet Hosea that boil to thesurface of Paul’s Jewish memory at just this peak moment. Paul doesn’t have themverbatim. What Hosea actually said was, at least in the text that has come downto us: “O Death, where are thy plagues? O Grave, where is thy scourge?” (Hosea13:14; my translation). But as God spoke these lines to Hosea, they are not apromise but a threat. We might better catch their sense if we translated, “O Death,bring on thy plagues! O Grave, lay on thy scourge!”

The lines come near the end of a poem in which God is seething with furyand prepared to tear Israel limb from limb for sinning against him. “I will destroyyou, O Israel,” he says, “Who can help you? Where now is your king, to save you?”(13:9). The Children of Israel are doomed to a ghastly death:

I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs,I will tear open their breast,

And there I will devour them like a lion,as a wild beast would rend them. (13:8)

Because she has rebelled against her God,they shall fall by the sword,

Their little ones shall be dashed in piecesand their pregnant women ripped open. (13:16)

That God can speak this way of his own people of Israel is not the point.The point is that his response to their offense, as on other occasions to their

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enemies’ offenses, is mass execution. Death itself, note well, is not God’s enemy but God’s weapon. Thus, Paul does not just quote Hosea out of contextwhen he makes “O Death . . . O Grave . . .” part of a vision of immortality; hequotes Hosea in a diametrically reversed context. But the reversal makes Paul’smoment of ecstatic exegesis, so to call it, a fine microcosm for the larger change Ispeak of, by which death itself does indeed become God’s enemy and does indeedcease to be his weapon. God has laid down the death weapon. He has disarmedhimself.

Did fire actually come down from heaven and consume the soldiers confronting Elijah? I assume not. Did the historical Jesus actually voice the disdain that Luke attributes to him for such religiously motivated violence?Perhaps, but perhaps not. Luke (or whoever wrote the Gospel According to Luke) may have invented the episode or recorded an oral tradition that wasbeyond checking at the point when he received it. As for the blood-curdling tiradethat Hosea places in the mouth of God or the towering vision of immortality thatPaul evokes, the question “Did it happen?” cannot coherently be asked of eitherone.

The only thing that matters in either contrasting pair is that the sanctiononce given to violence by the violent character of God has been withdrawn. Thereare no New Testament Psalms calling on God to rise up and smite Rome. Thereare, instead, Pauline exhortations to endure under Roman persecution and evenRoman martyrdom in the confident hope of resurrection and immortality. Yet ifthe expression of this change as exhortation is striking, more striking still is itsexpression as divine self-characterization. Jesus, according to the Gospel, is theWord of God made flesh. If the character of Jesus-the-Word changes, then God’smessage changes. It is indeed that simple. At its deepest level, the Gospel is legis-lation by characterization. It is social meaning in fictional form.

Jesus’ warrant for withdrawing divine sanction from religious violence, inother words, is his claim that he is God and therefore has the right to say whatGod wants or no longer wants. Though in the Elijah example Jesus says that God’scharacter has been misunderstood rather than that it has changed, the effect is thesame. A new kind of story is told about God, and in it he wants something new ofhis creatures. Jesus’ disciples, Jesus tells them, do not know “what manner of Spirit[they] are of,” which is to say what manner of God has created them. But Jesusclaims to know what they do not. Referring to himself as “Son of Man,” a title hereserves for his most pregnant comments about himself, Jesus associates his mys-terious self with the mystery of God, and then reveals that, in effect, God’s spec-tacular career as a warrior is over, the consequence being that they must not bewarriors either.

In the Torah, God is a mythic figure who acts in history. In the Gospel, Jesusis a historical figure who acts in myth. The kind of victory he promises is to be wonnot over any historical figure—not, most particularly, over Rome on the eve ofRome’s six-decade Jewish War—but, mythically, over death itself and over theSatan who bested God in Eden but will not best him again. As of old, this victorycalls for human fidelity and obedience to God; but as God now eschews violencetoward his enemies, so fidelity and obedience to him now require that his people


eschew it as well. They must do toward their enemies as he does toward his. WhenRome comes to crucify him, Jesus—God Incarnate on the terms of the fully devel-oped Christian myth, foreshadowed within Christian scripture itself in the GospelAccording to John—does not resist. Even after he rises from death to life, turningapparent defeat into redemptive victory, Rome is still Rome, and Caesar stillCaesar. And so it was to be when Rome came for his first followers. Unlike God’ssignature victory over Pharaoh, God Incarnate’s mythic, pacific victory over Satanentails neither defeat nor mortal danger for any historical adversary.

We may speculate that the historical matrix for this mythological re-visionwas a contemporary intuition on the part of some Jews that resistance to Romewould prove futile—as, in the event, it did. Jerusalem did not fall until forty yearsafter the death of Jesus, but serious bloodshed had begun much earlier. At thedeath of Herod the Great in 4 B.C.E., quite possibly the year of Jesus’ birth, thereoccurred a violent Jewish uprising and then a mass Roman crucifixion of capturedJewish rebels. During his lifetime and the decades immediately following, Pales-tine teetered on the verge of war, with recurrent outbreaks of actual warfare, untila climactic mass uprising brought in Vespasian, Titus, and the Roman legions withnear-genocidal results. A few decades later, a second, equally desperate uprisingunder Hadrian brought a second, equally crushing defeat. The most importantsocial fact about the time when Jesus lived and died is that it was a pre-war period,and the Jews were in mortal peril. The most important social fact about the timewhen the Christian scriptures were written is that it was a post-war period, andthe Jews had suffered a disastrous defeat.

Through the onset, duration, and aftermath of this protracted and cata-strophic military confrontation, God’s identity as a warrior-judge of ruthlesslyviolent proclivities seems to have come into question in various Jewish circles, notjust in the one that produced Christianity. Was God really like that? Or was hestill like that? The Testament of Abraham, a Jewish text contemporary with therise of Christianity, portrays Abraham and God dealing death to sinners as ruth-lessly as Moses and God do in Numbers 16, where the Earth opens up and swal-lows the rebel Korah and his followers, or as Elijah and God do in 2 Kings 1, thepassage cited above. But then comes a surprise: God steps in and stops Abraham,suggesting that their joint violence has really been more Abraham’s wish than hisown and inevitably planting the suspicion in readers’ minds that the violence ofNumbers 16 and 2 Kings 1 were more Moses’ and Elijah’s wish than God’s.Addressing himself to Michael, the commander of his angelic army, God says:

Michael, Commander-in-chief, command the chariot to stand still, and turnAbraham back, lest he see all the inhabited world. For if he were to see allthose living in sin, he would destroy all the creation. For behold, Abrahamhas not sinned, and he does not have mercy upon sinners. But I made theworld, and I do not wish to destroy any of them. Rather I delay the deathof a sinner until he turns and lives.1

1. Dale C. Allison, Jr., “Rejecting Violent Judgment: Luke 9:52–56 and Its Relatives,” Journalof Biblical Literature 121/3 (2002), pp. 459–478.

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God’s concluding words paraphrase a line from Ezekiel 18:32: “I have no pleasurein the death of anyone, says the Lord God. Turn, then, and live.”

But there was a great deal of scripture, as the Testament of Abraham clearlyrecognizes, against which that line could be quoted, most notably Genesis 18, inwhich God destroys Sodom despite Abraham’s intercession. The Testament ofAbraham, as Dale C. Allison, Jr., has recently observed:

turn[s] Gen 18 upside down. In the Bible it is not Abraham but God whodetermines to destroy the wicked; the patriarch, on the contrary, prays fortheir deliverance and God’s indulgence. So in the Testament God and hishuman “friend” exchange roles.2

But if God is prepared to exchange roles with Abraham, then, for the Testamentauthor no less than for Luke, God has changed.

In scripture, when God changes, he always seems to do so in an obliquemovement, claiming to have always been what he has just become or rejecting asdefective and human behaviors and attitudes he once embraced as divine. ThusEzekiel 18 begins:

The word of the Lord came to me: What do you mean by repeating thisproverb concerning the land of Israel, “The parents have eaten sour grapes,and the children’s teeth are set on edge”? As I live, says the Lord God, thisproverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Know that all lives are mine;the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine: it is only theperson who sins that shall die. . . . (18:1–4)

But collective punishment has been virtually a signature divine behavior.At Exodus34:7, in a theophany of maximum solemnity, God boasted of punishing “the parents’fault in the children and in the grandchildren to the third and fourth generation.”Jeremiah 31:29–30 quotes the same teeth-on-edge proverb but acknowledges, asEzekiel does not, that God’s conduct had made the proverb quite applicable to theexperience of Israel punished by God—until God changed and decided that “Every-one who eats unripe grapes will have his own teeth set on edge.”

The retreat from collective punishment in these texts is scarcely more thanan opening, but it is an opening that could be and apparently was seized andexploited later when circumstances were favorable. The Wisdom of Solomon,another pseudepigraphical text, written perhaps a century earlier in JewishAlexandria and eventually included in the Old Testament (though not in theTanakh), foreshadowed the New Testament use of God’s rare conciliatory andpeaceable moments to gainsay his many violent ones. In this text, Solomon saysto God:

. . . in your sight the entire cosmos is as a turn of the scale, and as a dewdropin the dawn alighting on the earth. But you have compassion over all,

2. Ibid., p. 474.


because you can do all, and you overlook the sins of human beings with aview to their repentance. For you love all that exists, and loathe nothingwhich you have created; for if you had hated anything you would never havefashioned it.3

Allison speculates about “an oral tradition or . . . a text no longer extant, a tradi-tion or text that raised a critical question mark over biblical tales in which prophetsbring down violent judgment upon human beings and cut short their earthly lives.”4

What matters from the evolutionary perspective, however, is less the details of thehistorical matrix than the fact that the myth that emerged by means of it hasacquired a wider applicability with each advance in military technology. With eachadvance, the madness of “militant” pacifism has moved a step closer to sanity and,beyond sanity, to the commonest of common sense.

So it is that the revision of an ancient myth may come to seem an evolu-tionary pre-adaptation, two millennia early, to conditions that may lie nearer inthe future than we think. Pre-adaptation, in evolutionary biology, is the develop-ment of traits in one environment that subsequently turn out to be advantageousin quite another environment. An environment may change around an organismas, for example, through climate change, or an organism may migrate into a new,physically different area where a trait that had made little or no difference beginsto make a big one. Thus, when bacteria are cultured in the presence of an anti-biotic, their surviving descendants commonly have a resistance to that antibiotic.The resistance is adaptation to that initial environment. Adaptation turns out to be pre-adaptation if and when the bacteria prove resistant to other, quite dif-ferent antibiotics. It is as if they were preparing for something they did not knowwas coming.

The Christian myth of a God who no longer tries to defeat his humanenemies may well be described as a defeatist myth. This is, famously, just how Nietzsche described it. Given a weak nation confronting an invincible empire, thisdefeatist myth may well have been locally and briefly adaptive, but it would notnecessarily be—and for many centuries clearly was not—universally or durablyadaptive. However, as the human-made environment for conflict has changed,what was true for a single weak nation at a single passing moment may becometrue for all nations all the time.

Writing about “bio-Armageddon” in the Los Angeles Times (October 10,2002), epidemiologist Scott P. Layne and political scientist Michael H. Sommerwrote as follows:

It costs about $1 million to kill one person with a nuclear weapon, about$1,000 to kill one person with a chemical weapon and about $1 to kill oneperson with a biological weapon. Low cost alone may dictate that currentand future terrorists will opt for the $1 biological killers.

3. Ibid., p. 471.4. Ibid., p. 468.

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Last year a bombshell of a scientific paper, published in the Journal ofVirology, revealed that a bioengineered form of mousepox—a close cousinof smallpox—was vaccine-resistant and 100% lethal. It showed that simplyinserting one immune-inhibiting gene into mousepox was all it took. . . .

It’s no longer hypothetical to bioengineer such an agent. And less than$1 million would be required to create deadly and contagious agents.

In the wrong hands, a bioengineered virus could be bottled and used asan insurance policy against invasion and overthrow. And, if unleashed, itcould change the very fabric of remaining modern civilization.

As $1 million shrinks to $1, the means for Armageddon are miniaturized anddemocratized. At these prices, everyman becomes his own military superpower, atwhich point peace by way of military victory, even the special case of victory bymilitary deterrence, would seem to become impossible. Only universal disarma-ment would seem to stand a chance of forestalling the self-extinction of the humanspecies, and universal disarmament, in turn, would seem possible, if at all, only bycultural change. Under such circumstances as these, the defeatist Christian mythas a counter-intuitive cultural artifact, bizarre and unworkable as it has been underhitherto normal human conditions, may begin to seem an unintended spiritual preadaptation to the maximally hazardous environment into which we are all nowmoving.

Obviously, this environment was not in place for the entire human race and the entire human planet at the time when, by the terms of the myth, GodIncarnate chose to die without a fight. For this reason, when Christianity becamethe state religion of the Roman Empire, its pacifist revision of the epic of God the Warrior was re-militarized with a vengeance, yet the texts that express the original revision survive and, taken at full strength, can still intrigue and give pause,just as they have done, at least intermittently, from the very start.

Early in the second century C.E., before Christians and Jews had definedone another dialectically into two distinct religions to be known thenceforth bydifferent names, before either the Mishnah or the New Testament had taken clearshape, and before the notion of an authoritative and exclusionary canon of scrip-ture had taken hold, a Christian bishop, Marcion of Sinope, pursued just the sortof disparity that I write of above in a now lost, reportedly voluminous work ofcomparative exegesis called Antitheses. In it, he concluded that the God of whomJesus spoke and the God who had created the world had to be two different gods,so different were their respective characters. Marcion’s ditheism, like his rejectionof the Hebrew Scriptures, was rejected by the more Judaic Christianity that livedon to become orthodoxy. But the fact that Marcion’s answer was rejected does notmean that Marcion’s problem was entirely resolved. For if there are not two gods,then—for anyone who accepts the premise that the Old and the New Testamentspeak of one and the same God—God must have undergone a radical change. Thecharacterological differences between God and God Incarnate, divine father anddivine son, are simply too salient to ignore.

Two gods or a changed God? Tertium non datur. For much of Christian the-ology, the notion of change in God has been unacceptable, and those parts of scrip-


ture that suggest change have been a scandal to be accommodated rather than anadvance to be celebrated. In my own opinion, it is because the scandal of changeis unavoidable and yet finally manageable within the canonical text that the greaterscandal of ditheism could be rejected as heresy. Allison comments:

In some Christian circles, the implied critique of 2 Kgs 1:9–12 in Luke9:51–56 made it, at least by Marcion’s time, part of a case for distinguishingbetween the God of the Jews and the God of the Christians. But the problemof conflicting theologies was not born with Christianity. That predicamentwas already internal to Judaism. The indiscriminately compassionate God ofEzek 33 and Wis 11 is not easily thought of as heeding a pitiless prayer forfire, and some Jews saw this plainly enough.5

Allison is right that the problem of conflicting theologies was not born with Chris-tianity, but the matter can be stated even more sharply: Christianity itself was bornof the problem of conflicting Jewish theologies.

Rabbinic Judaism sought to resolve this conflict by midrash, expanding scrip-ture in the middle in a way that muted and minimized the violence of God. InLamentations Rabbah, for example, God expresses dismay and regret and evenlaments his own condition after seeing what he has done to Jerusalem through theRomans. Alan Mintz in Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature(Syracuse University Press, 1984) quotes God’s cry of pain as he sees what he hasdone—“Woe to the King who succeeds in His youth and fails in His old age!”—and comments:

The new presence in the text as read by the Rabbis is divine pathos. Trans-formed at the moment of the Destruction, the figure of God switches fromthe monitory enforcer of punishment to the dazed sufferer whose sufferingderives in part from His own pain over the loss of His children and in partfrom His empathy with their affliction. The Destruction is a cosmic eventthat is a catastrophe for God as well as man. (p. 58)

Christianity’s midrash expands Jewish scripture at the end, not in the middle,but to a purpose much like the one Mintz speaks of. Founded by Jews and readinga New Testament written by Jews, Christianity resolves God’s conflict by continu-ing his story through an epilogue in which he becomes a human being who goesas a lamb to his own slaughter. The result, in either case, is a revision—relativelyradical or relatively conservative—of the identity of God and, of greatest eventualconsequence, a relative disarmament of God.

Or so I would contend. Theologians, whether Christian or Jewish, may dis-agree; but when change in myth is understood as adaptation in the interest of sur-vival and when, furthermore, God’s repudiation of violence in a given myth isviewed as a move toward the same repudiation in a species with a unique capac-ity to exterminate itself, then anthropology may embrace what theology resists.

5. Ibid., p. 478.

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This is what religion, and specifically Western religion, may have to do with theprospect held out in the “Dark Biology” trilogy of Richard Preston: The Hot Zoneon the Ebola virus (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); The Cobra Event, a novel imagininga fabricated, more effectively contagious virus than Ebola (Random House, 1998);and the most realistic and chilling of the three, The Demon in the Freezer on themilitarization of smallpox (Random House, 2002).

The story of how the Lion of Judah became the Lamb of God remains com-pelling as literature even if it is not relevant or “salvific” as proto-pacifist myth,but surely the one possibility need not preclude the other. Both, in any case, wereamong my motivations for writing the exploratory Christ: A Crisis in the Life ofGod (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), a work that takes its modest place among a numberof other “Marcionite” works produced in the twentieth century by writers of asociological turn of mind as well as by social scientists working within a literaryno less than a societal frame of reference. Particularly in the German Kultgurge-biet and under the impact of Adolf Harnack’s Marcion: Das Evangelium vomfremden Gott (1921), the allusion to Marcion could be quite explicit. It is so, forexample, in Ernst Bloch’s Geist der Utopie (1923). Similarly, in Thomas Mann’spost-World War II novel Doktor Faustus, Simon Magus, the ancient gnostic some-times seen as archetype for Faust, becomes the occasion for a meditation onmingled national and civilizational, human and divine failure—as Karen Grimstadhas demonstrated in her noteworthy The Modern Revival of Gnosticism andThomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (Camden House, 2002).

In the wake of the mid-century Nazi Shoah, Thomas Mann was not alone inraising the question of the goodness of God—a question that often seemed to takepriority over the existence of God. This question was raised with new insistencein many quarters, and with it the question of the goodness or the life-worthinessof the human species. Does this species deserve to survive? Can the man or womanwho has survived Auschwitz and learned from it the true character of Homosapiens be expected to resume normal life thereafter? In this form, the questionof the goodness of God was raised with great poignancy by the apparent suicideof Primo Levi.

The same question appears again in Oscar Hijuelos’s recent novel A SimpleHabana Melody (From When the World Was Good) (HarperCollins, 2002). In thisparadoxically enchanting work, an émigré Cuban composer, a bisexual voluptuarywho is also a devout Catholic, is interned at Buchenwald because of the accidentof his Jewish-sounding name. Israel Levis survives the war and makes his way backto Cuba, but until the last pages of the novel he is sunk in a deep and bitter depres-sion. Not only has he lost his faith in the goodness of God, he has also lost hisappetite for music. Why bother with it? The piano in his house sits silent. Hisformer captors’ cruel indifference to human life survives, by a final cruelty, as hisown indifference to everything, including even music, that once made his life sorichly humane and rewarding.

It is no insult to Hijuelos to say that his is one of many post-Shoah attemptsto engage the goodness of God and the viability of the human life-project asrelated questions. Only a minority of those many efforts has engaged this ques-tion by way of a re-reading of the Bible; few, for that matter, have drawn evolu-


tionary biology into the argument. Of the few that have turned to the Bible, mosthave gravitated not to the Gospel but to the Book of Job as the biblical text thatseems most radically to problematize God himself. But in all of these few, it is easyto hear the ghost of Marcion walking.

“If God is good, he is not God,” Archibald MacLeish wrote in his J.B.; “IfGod is God, he is not good.” Marcion would have had an answer for MacLeish.Marcion lives on as well, acknowledged or not, in critic George Steiner’s discus-sion of Job in Grammars of Creation (Yale University Press, 2001):

If the Maker is such as his motiveless torment of his loving servant suggests,then creation itself is in question. Then God is guilty of having created.[Emphasis added.]

Marcion had no difficulty at all in conceding that God had created the world. Godand God’s world were both terrible, and terrifyingly inconsistent, in just the sameway. Literary figures have been drawn to Marcion and to Gnosticism more gen-erally because the fact that God is life-like in this larger sense—wonderful andterrible in the way that life itself is wonderful and terrible—constitutes the verycore of his appeal on the literary page.

But there are times when an appealing page is not enough. There are his-toric moments when the survival of a nation or of the human species itself seemsto hang in the balance. Such are the moments that yield speculations about a godbeyond God and daring stories about unthinkable change in God. Carl Jung,personally and professionally interested in Gnosticism as he was, pursued thisquestion in his Answer to Job. My own book Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God isa different but related answer to Job and, in effect, to Marcion as well. No, thereare not two gods, I maintain, but the one God has repented and changed.

Or, as we may now choose to put it, God has adapted.

Documents

The Self-Disarmament of God as Evolutionary Pre-Adaptation