THEOdyssey

Prosperity Theology: Kenneth Copeland, faith-filled words, and me.

With the couple of recent posts made about the WoF movement, I thought I’d give you all an ex-insider’s view on the topic. When I first moved to Arkansas five years ago, my family and I were desperately searching for a church that matched our non-denominational church we had left behind in Michigan. Community Christian Church had a wonderful Pastor, very studious and committed to preaching sermons that represented the Bible in an accurate and applicable way. The church was small when we had first joined, under 100 members, but had grown to a considerable size when we left it. After a few months of church hopping in Arkansas we found a small group of non-denominational Christians meeting in a school. The Pastor was funny, intelligent, and had some really great sermons. The people were loving and committed to serving Christ daily. My family had found a church home, and we stayed there for almost 4 years.

Sadly, I don’t attend their services anymore.

My former Pastor is a great guy. I have seen Christ in him more than most of the people I have known, and he truly has a deep love for God. But as the years went by attending his church, things gradually changed within the sermon content. Unknowingly, my church had become a Prosperity Theology church, and I was a full fledged member. “Greedy psycho!” That’s might be what you’re thinking. But you’ll find that most people who subscribe to the Prosperity Theology way of thinking truly are not money mongers at all. The message that “God wants you to be wealthy” is viewed as a way God will use the individual to help the poor and needy. All throughout Proverbs we see that a man will be blessed when he helps the poor. Proverbs 28:27 says that those who help the poor will indeed not want. 2 Corinthians 8 speaks about the abundance of the Corinthian church helping the needy as they gave liberally, and those in abundance would give also to the Corinthian church when it had a need. This was my heart when I was under the influence of Prosperity Theology, to always have more than enough so I could help people everywhere.

At the time, this was all well and good in my mind. Why wouldn’t God want all his children to be rich? The Golden Rule in the business world is he who has the gold makes the rules. The wealthy Christian has the power and the influence to change the world for God’s glory. Yes! Yet there were some nagging questions, and they lead me to start really analyzing what was being said, and the logic behind it all.

Prosperity Theology and the Word of Faith belief usually go hand-in-hand, and I thank God that they do. The WoF beliefs are really what got me questioning what I was being taught. The basic premise is this: Hebrews 11:1 in the KJV states that “faith is the substance of things unseen”. So faith is a “substance”. Once I heard Kenneth Copeland, the WoF movement’s main man, state that faith was a literal, tangible force. This is all supplemented by God speaking everything we know into existence from ex nihilo, faith coming by hearing (if you’re hearing it has to be spoken) the Word of God, various Hebrew Scripture pieces of men speaking blessings over the people, confessing with your mouth and believing in your heart, etc. Now, this is all supplemented with the dogma of Seed, Time, and Harvest (STH). STH is the glue that holds Prosperity Theology and WoF doctrine together. You speak “faith-filled” words, you keep applying your faith, and then you will receive what you have believed for. The faith-filled words are the seeds you plant, the continual speaking and believing that this will come to pass is the growth time, and the obtaining of the desire is the harvest. There are several verses that are used to support this, such as reaping what you sow, the Lord giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, as well as a few things written by Paul. I’m sure this is all very confusing, but at the time it made a lot of sense to me. Scripture deconstructionalism and reconstructionalism are the prime tools for Prosperity Theology and WoF doctrine. I don’t want to get into refuting all of the points right now (perhaps in my next few articles), I simply want to present the beliefs.

So the formula was simple: give $10 (seed), keep serving God and believing/applying faith in His promises (time), and eventually a blessing of money will come because of the seed (harvest). Keep speaking positive, faith-filled words and I’ll never be sick or come to harm. An interesting point to note about WoF doctrine is you can speak positive things into existence as well as negative, horrible things. I was constantly warned not to say “I’m getting a cold” if I was feeling bad, because my words will be what really brought about my cold. The symptoms were simply an attack from the enemy. But that’s a topic for a later article. Anyway, what I could never push out of my mind was Paul. I knew that Paul had more faith than I did, but why was he shipwrecked, snake-bitten, beaten and imprisoned? Why would he say to count this as joy if it was the product from a lack of faith ("those things you fear," in Kenneth Copeland’s words). The answer I would repeatedly get was it had to happen to Paul, it was meant for him. That really didn't clear anything up for me. Also, the sermons by all of the leading Prosperity Theology preachers started to get old. Yes, I know God wants me to be wealthy and happy, but that’s not helping me learn to control my anger and love unconditionally. I became hungry for something I was not getting fed. I started studying Patristic Era history, the early Church, and the Orthodox beliefs of the early Church Fathers. WOW. Here’s what I was hungry for. Here were men getting martyred, go so far as to pray for martyrdom, having nothing but love to completely fulfill them and affect the world around them. I devoured it, as I still do.

Thus began my great exodus from Prosperity Theology and WoF doctrine.

The more I delved into the early heroes of the Church, the less Prosperity Theology made sense to me. I would read about the intense zeal and passion of the persecuted Christians overseas, who have barely any money or material goods. Was there such a lack of faith there to keep them in poverty and persecution like that? It didn't add up. So, I regrettably had to say goodbye to the church  I had come to know and love so much. A few of my friends and my whole family followed in my stead when I got them to review what they were being taught, but there are many left who, unfortunately, are living within this skewed, burdensome version of Christianity.

Today I’m fully against Prosperity Theology, and WoF doctrine is just wacky to me now. The further and further I get from it, the stranger and more foreign it becomes to me. How could I have possibly bought into these weird things? The answer is a gradual leading into it. Now I hear my ex-church is extremely steeped in Prosperity Theology and over-the-top WoF hyper-Charismatic elements. But really, you’ll find Prosperity Theology in so much of today’s Christianity. It plagues Christian bookstores and television. I remember watching a televangelist channel with a newer convert to Christianity, and he said “You know, some of these guys just seem like outright thieves!”

I had to agree.

-Mike

So you want to understand the Iraq War?

This is a good and widely talked about article analyzing what has happened in the war in Iraq.

It was published in the Armed Forces Journal I recomend it.

"America's generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq. First, throughout the 1990s our generals failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly. Second, America's generals failed to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq. Finally, America's generals did not provide Congress and the public with an accurate assessment of the conflict in Iraq.

Despite paying lip service to "transformation" throughout the 1990s, America's armed forces failed to change in significant ways after the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In "The Sling and the Stone," T.X. Hammes argues that the Defense Department's transformation strategy focuses almost exclusively on high-technology conventional wars. The doctrine, organizations, equipment and training of the U.S. military confirm this observation. The armed forces fought the global war on terrorism for the first five years with a counterinsurgency doctrine last revised in the Reagan administration. Despite engaging in numerous stability operations throughout the 1990s, the armed forces did little to bolster their capabilities for civic reconstruction and security force development. Procurement priorities during the 1990s followed the Cold War model, with significant funding devoted to new fighter aircraft and artillery systems. The most commonly used tactical scenarios in both schools and training centers replicated high-intensity interstate conflict. At the dawn of the 21st century, the U.S. is fighting brutal, adaptive insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, while our armed forces have spent the preceding decade having done little to prepare for such conflicts.

Having spent a decade preparing to fight the wrong war, America's generals then miscalculated both the means and ways necessary to succeed in Iraq. The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq's population. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America's generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory. Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as "Fiasco" and "Cobra II." However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public."

Word of Faith: Prosperity Theology II

  So, until Wednesday night I had never been to a church that followed what is called the Word of Faith movement.  This is a movement that is followed in churches aligned with Oral Roberts and Kenneth Copeland, among others.  It is also closely linked with what is known as Prosperity Theology, which I have written on a couple of posts down.  But Word of Faith (WoF) is more than just Prosperity Theology.  WoF has several distinct and, to me, rather disturbing beliefs about how God works in the world. 

  In the particular sermon I heard (and here I have an aside:  I had known that sermons could be more than ten minutes long; but two hours was way too much!!) there was an allusion to a specific doctrine of God found within the WoF movement.  In the Wof movement, God has seceded some of His sovereignty to the believer; hence the doctrine known variously as “positive confession” or “say-it-and-claim-it.”  Apparently they trace this doctrine to God in Genesis “speaking” the world into existence.  What it works out to (as far as I can tell) is that if a person with enough faith prays aurally telling God to heal them, they will be healed.  So the man giving the sermon at the church said that believers who were asking for God’s will to be done were not actually praying for anything.  Apparently, the Lord’s Prayer is mistaken then in asking for this then.  There is something else to be noted about this doctrine that lies under a first viewing.  By claiming that one can use God’s covenant with Abraham to tell God to do something, the teachers of the WoF movement are making a strange claim that God has place Himself under the law of the created universe.  It appears to make the claim that God’s will is somewhat beneath the Law, rather than that the Law is a creation of God’s will.

  The WoF movement is also basing this claim on an almost heretical blending of God and man.  Some of the main leaders in this movement (and I will provide some links to sites maintaining listings and analysis of their more memorable sayings) have claimed that God has made man the equivalent of Himself.  This goes beyond the traditional teaching that humans may become more Christ-/God-like in blurring the ontological distinction between God and humankind.

 

  The traditional understanding is that we are creation and God is Creator.  This is a simple way of understanding that God and human beings are distinct in being from each other.  No matter how “great” a person becomes, no matter how much God works in us to make us more like Him; we will always be creation and not creator.  God is infinite and we are not; but in remaking God in their own image, WoF teachers are following the paths of many who wished to place their own sovereignty before God’s.

  Christ’s place in the economy of salvation is also changed in the WoF movement.  Instead of the Sacrifice being Christ taking our place on the cross, teachers of the WoF movement spiritualize it and place it either in the Garden or in Hell.  Some of these leaders have taught that Christ has not forgiven our sins by becoming the true sin offering on the cross; but rather Christ literally became sin, taking on a “satanic nature” and suffered because of this in Hell for three days.  This is quite different from the more traditional view that, where the Bible and the Creeds say that Christ descended to Hell or the dead, it means that Christ went to Sheol to bring His good news to the departed.  Hell is an entirely different “place” that what is meant in the traditional teachings even though there are a few different explanations for what Hell actually means, as I have tried to explain in my earlier post, To Deny Hell.  The WoF movement teaches this (I think, because it does not make any sense to me) because they say that Adam’s fall turned over ownership of the world to Satan, and that Christ had to take on Satan’s nature which had to be killed in Hell in order to restore to world to God’s position.

  As I was hearing the sermon, and as I have done research since; my first reaction is to sit open mouthed and dumb struck.  But I am not done researching this, so stay tuned…

Bryan

What am I reading?

So, I have a sort of writer's block at the moment; but I wanted to post something so I decided to list some of the books I'm reading.  I am usually reading 4 or 5 at a time not because I'm bright but because I have a short attention span.  Here's what I'm working on:

Blue Like Jazz by Donald Millar:  This is the one I have in front of me right now.  I'm half way through it and it's pretty good.  I'm not all that familiar with the Emerging Church movement, but this book at least makes it look interesting.  Although, it is a lot of disconnected stories, it sort of feels like the way I think myself.  Sort of a random assortment of meaning and junk I'm trying to work through.

Jesus of Nazareth by the Pope:  Just got this one, and I have only read one chapter but it was a good one.  I like-a da Pope.  I was given one of his books when he was still Joseph Ratzinger and it shook up my understanding of the meaning of the Eucharist, a really great theologian.  Also, possibly the only great theologian I've been in shouting distance of; and when I shouted, he waved. 

The Coming Anarchy by Robert Kaplan:  One of those books that makes you realize that the world isn't all roses and honey bees.  Some really tough thoughts on the future of our modern world.  I didn't think I was much of a fan of Kaplan's until I had to read the first essay of this book in an International Relations class in college.  But he makes you understand that if we keep letting the world slide in the direction it's going, it's going to be a challenge to maintain democratic civilization.

Dying to Win by Robert Pape:  This is a study of sucide terrorism and the reasons and groups who use it.  I think it's a good book for anyone who is trying to understand what is going on in the Middle East because it looks at what the conventional wisdom is in this subject, and what the evidence demonstrates is truly the case.  I wouldn't say buy it, but if you can get it through your library: Read It!

Ulysseys by James Joyce:  This is the book I've said I'm reading for a couple of years now.  It's interesting to see Joyce trying to discover a new style of writing, and the books is rather good; but it is very hard to read.  It's sort of a dip in book.

Joseph Smith by Richard Bushman:  As far as I know this is the most recent biography of the LDS Prophet, and it is okay.  I would recomend reading it, but you should really read it along with something like No Man Knows My History by Fawn Brodie.  The two together allow the reader to synthesize a better picture of this complicated man than either alone.  It is currently the "bathroom reader," because I've read it before and find the whole history of the LDS Church to be fasinating.  It is one of my ambitions to write a book comparing Alexander Campbell and Joseph Smith =, trying to place both in relation to each other and within the wider framework of the rejection of Calvinism during the Second Great Awakening.  Perhaps that will make a good Ph.D paper...

Anyway that's what I am spending the majority of my reading time on, but I do dip into others as the muse leads.

bryan

Down Syndrome and Gattaca: Updated

  Today in the Times there is an article about the use of fetal genetic testing in order to screen for Down Syndrome specifically.  It also says that among cases where the genetic testing indicates that the child might have the syndrome, abortion is the solution in 90% of the cases.  I was talking about the movie Gattaca yesterday, and this puts my thoughts of that movie into sharper focus. 

  The movie presents a brave new world where most people are genetically screened before birth in order to only have the genetically superior children born.  The protagonist in this story is man who was not screened in this way, and struggles against a system where he is discriminated against because he is not genetically superior.  One of the ways he does this is to assume the identity of a genetically superior person who has become a paraplegic as a result of an accident.  The movie works on one level to contrast these to characters; where the genetically inferior struggles to define himself rather than accept societies notion of what he should be, while the man who is supposed to be genetically superior decides that he is worthless because of his disability.

  The “world’ of Gattaca has decided that the value of a person is based on the genetic predisposition, something that they can neither hide nor alter, represents something very disturbing of our own society.  As this article in the Times says we have been able to test for genetic disorders in the womb for sometime, allowing parents to place a value on their offspring before birth.  The idea that we should practice an unborn eugenics on people we have decided are less valuable (like fetuses with Down Syndrome) suggests to me that we are not that far removed from our forbearers who practiced slavery based on race.  Or those in Nazi Germany who decided that people who had disorders such as Down Syndrome or because of their ancestry were not valuable to the state.

  Perhaps this is just my overreacting to something I find quite disturbing, but in my mind the devaluing of human life based on genetic testing represents a creep back to a point where we begin to value people not because they are made in God’s Image; but on the basis of their potential worth is frightening.  It represents to me the worst materialistic tendency of our nature.

Bryan

Update - I found this today:  It seems that a couple in Britain are using embryonic screening to "weed out" those that show a predisposition for a congenital squint.  I'm not kidding...

Update Update - From the NY Times on the morality of this: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/weekinreview/13harm.html?_r=1&oref=slogin 

Prosperity Theology

  I get a newsletter from the Subiaco Abbey here in Arkansas (though I like getting it I must say I feel a little bad because they keep sending it even though I have only ever bought one thing a bottle of Monk Sauce which is delicious!).  In the most recent of these newsletters the Abbot writes about the so-called Prosperity Theology.  The Abbot says that he thinks that this might be a new heresy, but I do not think so.  I believe it is an old and pernicious one.  The basic idea is that God desires that all people of faith should be prosperous, healthy, and happy; and its proponents go further than this by saying that if the believer has faith then God will do the work to make this so.  Primarily the people who teach this are affiliated with Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland, or Joel Osteen.  I am at a loss as to how these people can teach this wrongheaded theology with a straight face, and how do their parishioners fall it to believing it?

  This seems to me to be an exceedingly “American” materialist view of the promise of Christ, though it is not only present in America.  It seems that this view crops up where ever Christians have an easy life, where they do not face any hardship for Christ.  The Abbot asks whether we could preach this in places like Iraq, Sudan, or China.  Places were Christians face both economic alienation and persecution for their faith in Christ.   Places where Christians do not even have access to clean drinking water. Because they suffer, does Prosperity Theology teach that they do not have enough faith?  What of the sufferings of the Saints?  People whose trials and sickness have uplifted and strengthened the Church?  What of John Paul the Great, whose suffering from Parkinson’s became a way to see that we may all have faith even when suffering.

  To pastors who tell their flock that God desires that all of them be rich enough to have their own jets what do they say to verses where Christ tells a rich man to sell all his positions in order to follow Him?  Instead of promising us wealth and fame, Christ says that we will be hated and that we will suffer; but we are storing up treasures in Heaven.  Our Father will provide for us, but that does not necessarily mean that we will be rich in things; rather when we truly depend on God we will be rich spiritually.

Bryan

Athanasius contra mundum

Outside the pages of the New Testament itself, Athanasius is probably the man to whom we chiefly owe the preservation of the Christian faith. He was born around AD 298, and lived in Alexandria, Egypt, the chief center of learning of the Roman Empire.

In 313 the Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, which changed Christianity from a persecuted to an officially favored religion. About six years later, a presbyter (elder, priest) Arius of Alexandria began to teach concerning the Word of God (John 1:1) that "God begat him, and before he was begotten, he did not exist." Athanasius was at that time a newly ordained deacon, secretary to Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, and a member of his household. His reply to Arius was that the begetting, or uttering, of the Word by the Father is an eternal relation between Them, and not a temporal event. Arius was condemned by the bishops of Egypt (with the exceptions of Secundus of Ptolemais and Theonas of Marmorica), and went to Nicomedia, from which he wrote letters to bishops throughout the world, stating his position.

The Emperor Constantine undertook to resolve the dispute by calling a council of bishops from all over the Christian world. This council met in Nicea (Council of Nicea), just across the straits from what is now Istanbul, in the year 325, and consisted of 317 bishops. Athanasius accompanied his bishop to the council, and became recognized as a chief spokesman for the view that the Son was fully God, co-equal and co-eternal with the Father.

The party of Athanasius was overwhelmingly in the majority. (The western, or Latin, half of the Empire was very sparsely represented, but it was solidly Athanasian, so that if its bishops had attended in force, the vote would have been still more lopsided.) It remained to formulate a creedal statement to express the consensus. The initial effort was to find a formula from Holy Scripture that would express the full deity of the Son, equally with the Father. However, the Arians cheerfully agreed to all such formulations, having interpreted them already to fit their own views. (Those of you who have conversed with members of the Watchtower Society, who consider themselves the spiritual heirs of Arius, will know how this works.) Finally, the Greek word "homo-ousios" (meaning "of the same substance, or nature, or essence") was introduced, chiefly because it was one word that could not be understood to mean what the Arians meant. Some of the bishops present, although in complete disagreement with Arius, were reluctant to use a term not found in the Scriptures, but eventually saw that the alternative was a creed that both sides would sign, each understanding it in its own way, and that the Church could not afford to leave the question of whether the Son is truly God (the Arians said "a god") undecided. So the result was that the Council adopted a creed which is a shorter version of what we now call the Nicene Creed, declaring the Son to be "of one substance with the Father." At the end, there were only two holdouts, the aforesaid Secundus and Theonas.

(For a dramatic but historically accurate account of the Council of Nicea, see the play, The Emperor Constantine, by Dorothy L Sayers, available in book form.)

No sooner was the council over than its consensus began to fall apart. Constantine had expected that the result would be unity, but found that the Arians would not accept the decision, and that many of the orthodox bishops were prepared to look for a wording a little softer than that of Nicea, something that sounded orthodox, but that the Arians would accept. All sorts of compromise formulas were worked out, with all shades of variation from the formula of Nicea.

In 328, Alexander died, and Athanasius succeeded him as bishop of Alexandria. He refused to participate in these negotiations, suspecting (correctly as it turned out) that once the orthodox party showed a willingness to make reaching an agreement their highest priority, they would end up giving away the store. He defended the full deity of Christ against emperors, magistrates, bishops, and theologians. For this, he was regarded as a trouble-maker by Constantine and his successors, and was banished from Alexandria a total of five times by various emperors. (Hence the expression "Athanasius contra mundum," or, "Athanasius against the world.") Eventually, Christians who believed in the Deity of Christ came to see that once they were prepared to abandon the Nicene formulation, they were on a slippery slope that led to regarding the Logos as simply a high-ranking angel. The more they experimented with other formulations, the clearer it became that only the Nicene formulation would preserve the Christian faith in any meaningful sense, and so they re-affirmed the Nicene Creed at the Council of Constantinople in 381, a final triumph that Athanasius did not live to see.

It was a final triumph as far as councils of bishops were concerned, but the situation was complicated by the fact that after Constantine there were several Arian emperors (not counting the Emperor Julian, who was a pagan, but correctly saw that the most effective way to fight Christianity was to throw all his weight on the side of the Arians). Under one of them Arian missionaries were sent to convert the Goths, who became the backbone of the Roman Army (then composed chiefly of foreign mercenaries) with the result that for many years Arianism was considered the mark of a good Army man. The conversion of Clovis, King of the Franks, in 496, to orthodox Christianity either gave the Athanasian party the military power to crush Arianism or denied the Arian Goths the military supremacy that would have enabled them to crush Athanasian Christianity, depending on your point of view.

Since Alexandria had the best astronomers, it was the duty of the Bishop of Alexandria to write to the other bishops every year and tell them the correct date for Easter. Naturally, his annual letter on this topic contained other material as well. One Easter Letter (or Paschal Letter) of Athanasius is well known for giving a list of the books that ought to be considered part of the canonical Scriptures, with a supplementary list of books suitable for devotional reading.

For the New Testament, he lists the 27 books that are recognized today. (If you will look at your list of New Testament books, you may note that Matthew through 2 Thessalonians were never in dispute, that the next four were subject to relatively little dispute, and that the remaining books had more trouble being accepted. There were also a few books that looked as if they might make the list, but eventually did not, the most conspicuous being the Epistle of Barnabas, the Epistle of Clement, and the Shepherd of Hermas.)

For the Old Testament, his list is like that used by most Protestants, except that he omits Esther, and includes Baruch, with the letter of Jeremiah. His supplementary list is Wisdom, Sirach, Tobias, Judith, and Esther. He does not mention Maccabees.

Two quotations from the writings of Athanasius follow:

We were made "in the likeness of God." But in course of time that image has become obscured, like a face on a very old portrait, dimmed with dust and dirt.

When a portrait is spoiled, the only way to renew it is for the subject to come back to the studio and sit for the artist all over again. That is why Christ came--to make it possible for the divine image in man to be recreated. We were made in God's likeness; we are remade in the likeness of his Son.

To bring about this re-creation, Christ still comes to men and lives among them. In a special way he comes to his Church, his "body", to show us what the "image of God" is really like.

What a responsibility the Church has, to be Christ's "body," showing him to those who are unwilling or unable to see him in providence, or in creation! Through the Word of God lived out in the Body of Christ they can come to the Father, and themselves be made again "in the likeness of God."

written by James Kiefer

taken from Mission St Clare

Gunkel and Genesis: Part 3

III. Is Genesis 1-11 Dependent on Borrowing from Other Ancient Near Eastern Mythology?

The charge that Genesis 1-11 is derivative of other mythologies is a hard one to deal with, since it depends on so many subjective criteria-even more than those we have already dealt with. We shall assume for the purposes of our discussion that what was intended here were references to certain alleged mythological motifs in the text.

One of the earliest candidates as a source for such borrowing was the struggle between the chief deity of a region and the chaos monster. In Genesis it was said that the conflict was between Yahweh and the "deep," Hebrew tehom. Now tehom, the "deep," was thought by most scholars to be a somewhat purged reference to Tiamat. In the Babylonian epic of creation, called the Enuma Elish ("When above..."), the chief god to emerge in Babylon, Marduk, slew the dragon Tiamat, a personification of the sea and watery depths. He sliced her in half and fashioned one half of her into the "sky" with its "upper sea," while with the other half he formed the "lower sea" on which he rested the earth.

Nowhere have scholars banked more heavily on the equation of one word, "the deep," for linking a Genesis story with a Babylonian background. Ever since Gunkel argued in 1895 that tehom, "deep, ocean, sea," in Genesis 1:2 retained vestiges of Babylonian mythology, it has been popular to claim that there was a direct relationship between tehom and the Babylonian goddess Tiamat. Typical of the canonical status that this discussion has reached is the statement by Sidney H. Hooke. He alleged that "The Hebrew word used for the chaos of waters, 'the deep' is tehom, a word generally acknowledged to be a Hebrew corruption of the name of the chaos-dragon slain by Marduk before he proceeded to create order out of chaos." But Hooke's statement can be multiplied in almost every manual on the OT that appeared just after the middle of the last century. One of the most popular writers, Bernhard W. Anderson, wrote in his much used Understanding the Old Testament that "the Hebrew word for 'deep' (tehom) is equivalent to the Babylonian word for Tiamat; here we have a distant echo of the mythology of the ancient world. There were many others who joined in the chorus, but the point always was the same: the Genesis creation story had to be derived from mythological sources due to the philological similarities between "deep" and Babylonian Tiamat.

The difficulty with borrowing a feminine Babylonian word and bringing it over into Hebrew unaugmented by any sufformative elements, and locating a guttural letter "h" (Hebrew he) in the middle of the word, has never been explained, argued Alexander Heidel as long ago as 1951. However, Heidel's careful work is seldom answered or factored into the more pervasive allegiance to the view that tehom is derived from Babylonian Tiamat. Kenneth Kitchen added his voice to Heidel's when he observed that the equation of these two terms was a "complete fallacy." Kitchen went on to note that the rule in the ancient Near East was to build legends and myths out of simple accounts and traditions, by way of accretion and embellishment, rather than the other way around. Accordingly, one need only remember that tehom shares a common Semitic root that also appears in the Canaanite texts from Ugarit as thm, meaning "sea" or the like, as early as the second millennium B.C.

Nahum Sarna had attempted to mount a response to Heidel's complaint by noting that: (1) while tehom is not feminine in grammatical form, it does frequently employ a feminine verb or adjective, (2) tehom has the characteristics of a proper name in that it is used without the definite article, and (3) Genesis 19:25; Deuteronomy 33:13 and Habakkuk 3:10 place tehom in poetic address and have tehom "crouching" and "crying out." However, John Skinner had anticipated all three arguments when he had previously noted that (1) tehom is "confined to poetry (except Gen 1:2; 7:11; 8:2; Deut 8:7; Amos 7:4)"; (2) the invariable absence of the definite article (except with the plural in Ps 106:9 and Is 63:13) may point to the fact that it is a proper name, but not that it is a personification; and (3) the admittedly clear references to personification are in the poetic passages of Genesis 49:25 and Deuteronomy 33:13.

One more argument might be added here, since this equation of the "deep" with Tiamat is the anchor on which so much of the case for Babylonian borrowing for the creation story in the Bible hangs. Canaan is the more natural environmental context from which any contest with the sea (the god Marduk or Yam) or sea goddess might arise because of its proximity to the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, Thorkild Jacobsen had argued that Marduk means "son of the storm"; therefore his conflict with Tiamat was a battle with the elements: the god of the storm, rain, lightning and thunder versus the goddess of the sea. That is the same myth that arose in the middle of the second millennium in Canaan in the Ugaritic myth of Baal versus Yam, "sea." Thus, it is now a question as to who borrowed from whom? Jacobsen concluded that the myth originally arose in Canaan and the borrowing was just the reverse of what we had always envisioned in scholarship: the east Semite Babylonians had borrowed it from the west Semites of Canaan. Moreover, this would make more philological sense assuming that Babylonian tiamat came from tihamatum, whereas the reverse process raised all the philological objections we have already heard. It was J. V. Kinnier Wilson who finally put the whole issue into perspective when he warned: "The theory that Hebrew Genesis is genetically related to the Babylonian has long been held... and has relied to a large extent on the much publicized equation of Tiamat with the Hebrew tehom, 'the deep.' It is now, however, recognized that since the two words have different meanings... it is of no importance whether they are etymologically connected or not.... [T]he epic has no connections of any kind or at any point with Genesis." That has not stopped the shibboleth from still being repeated as can be seen in Lloyd R. Bailey's 1993 work entitled Genesis, Creation and Creationism. He still describes the "lower sea," or the bottom half of Tiamat as "the OT tehom, 'Deep.' " But the equation is now dead and so is the assumption that it is solid evidence for a Babylonian source for the Genesis creation story. The concept of a personified Tiamat who is a mythical antagonist to Marduk never even comes close to being behind the notion of tehom in Genesis 1:2. Instead, tehom is just part of God's creation, inanimate, unpersonified and nonresistant to God's work of creating.

Another example of the use of borrowing as the source of some of the materials in Genesis is the verb "brood" in Genesis 1:2. This word, Gunkel argued, lent support to the theory that the Hebrew writer was indebted to the Phoenicians at this point, for they held that the world came about after the cosmic egg was hatched. Thus, it was claimed, the Spirit brooded over the world egg in order to hatch it.

But it turns out that the very root used here, rhp, does occur in Ugaritic, a close cognate language with Hebrew, where it has the same meaning as it does in Deuteronomy 32:11. There the eagles "hover, flutter, or coast" in the air caring for the young eaglets as they learn to fly. The same imagery is used of God caring for the forming of the earth. There is no possible attachment to a Phoenician myth about a world egg, and therefore it is another dubious example of the writer's borrowing from other Near Eastern myths to depict what he wanted to say.

Others have pointed to the "Tannin" that appeared on the fifth day of creation in Genesis 1:20-21 as being parallel to the "Dragon" (Ugaritic tnn) that the goddess Anath muzzled along with the other monsters like Yam ("sea"), Nahar ("river"), Lotan and Leviathan. But again, the case for Tannin being a proper name collapses, for in seven of its thirteen uses in the OT, the term simply refers to an animal: a crocodile or a similar big water animal without any mythological overtones. Instead, the tanninim are creatures of God in Genesis 1:21 and Psalm 148:7. They do not possess mythical powers; in fact, that may be why the Hebrew verb bara, "to create" (always out of nothing; for there is never any agency of material used in connection with bara) is used for only the second time in the creation narrative: as a polemic against any inferences that such creatures were preexistent rivals of the creator. Tanninim is a generic term for large water creatures in contrast to the term "swarming" aquatic creatures, which probably represents all the small water creatures. God created both the large and the small water creatures, just as Psalm 104:25-26 will later also affirm.

Even the creation of the luminaries contains a similar protest against pagan mythologies in that the writer of Genesis never names the "sun" and "moon" by name, but calls them by the names of the "greater light" and "lesser light" (Gen 1:16). The function assigned to these lights was to give light and to rule the day and the night, but it was not to rule the other astral bodies or astral deities as it appeared in the mythologies of the ancient Near East. As von Rad concluded, "the entire passage vv. 14-19 breathes a strong anti-mythical pathos."

Some think that the best illustration of Hebrew borrowing from Babylonian mythologies is to be found in the bird episode (the sending out of the birds from the ark) of the Babylonian flood story called the Gilgamesh Epic. But the scholarly community is beholden to W. G. Lambert for his masterful article on the Babylonian background to Genesis, for he began by re-evaluating the dates of our alleged prototypes in Sumer and Babylon. An interesting development occurred: the Sumerian prototype dated from about 1800 B.C., but it made no mention of the sending out of the birds from the boat. There is an incomplete copy of the earliest known Babylonian text from around 1600 B.C., but to date, however, it too lacks any reference to the episode with the birds and that which scholars had always judged to be the most telling mark of dependency of all. Thus, the only surviving testimony to this the most telling parallel part of the account of the flood is dated later than the biblical account. Nevertheless, Lambert still resolutely held that in spite of this disappointing fact, there was a "certain dependency of the Hebrew writers on a Mesopotamian tradition."

Apparently, then, no copies of the Babylonian flood story contained a reference to this, the most telling parallel, earlier than 750 B.C. Surely, this seriously weakens the case for Hebrew borrowing from the Babylonians for the story of the flood. It would be just as plausible, if not more so (given the fact that one of the closest parallels showed up later than the projected borrower's text), to say that both stories are a reflex of a real event in history, or that both are dependent on a source common to both.

Gunkel's case for borrowing of even purged mythologies continues to be difficult to sustain when the evidence is put under very close scrutiny. This criterion that argues for borrowing rather than reflections of first-hand evidence cannot be expected to carry the weight it has been assigned by modernity.

Conclusion

Before taking up the final three criteria suggested by Gunkel, which are long and detailed, it is important to take time to assess what has been argued so far. First, writing originated much earlier than most had at one time assumed. Therefore, all judgments about preliterate societies mentioned in Genesis 1-11 must be thoroughly revised.

The text decidedly points to the fact that it was dependent on sources. Some, if not most, of these sources were written. Hence, the fact that the events concern themselves only with family events is not a fact that removes its significance from those events that have public and international interest, especially if families were the main units of those whose accounts were being featured.

The major attempts to derive the events or accounts of Genesis 1-11 from other ancient Near Eastern sources have not measured up to the linguistic demands placed on the texts. One must be loath to attribute the results in Genesis as the work of more fertile imaginations than as a sample of reality and real public events such as they were for the limited race of humanity at that time.

The text of Genesis 1-11 must still be presumed to be innocent until it is definitely proven guilty by external evidence. That is the challenge of the reliability tests proposed here.