Living Biblically

Ten Guides for Fulfillment and Happiness

Kaplan

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621898931
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Living Biblically de-situates biblical wisdom from its formally religious-theological underpinnings and offers it as a guide for fulfilled, happy living. Although over 95 percent of Americans have some sense of a meaning-providing transcendent power, 75 percent of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists lack such belief. Without intelligent, applicable access to biblical wisdom, many unwittingly live out the tragic patterns emerging from classical Greece underlying much of modern life and psychotherapy. People are stuck, even trapped, without hope of redemptive change. They spin their wheels, cycling back and forth. Biblical narratives, in contrast, portray people as growing, developing, and overcoming problematic life situations. This book presents a systematic yet readable delineation of how biblical wisdom can apply to ten issues of daily life: 1) Relating to the Environment, 2) Relating to Another as Yourself, 3) Relating to Authority, 4) Relating to the Opposite Sex, 5) Relating to a Son, 6) Relating to a Daughter, 7) Relating to Siblings, 8) Relating Body to Soul, 9) Relating to a Self-Destructive Person, and 10) Relating to Misfortune. In each chapter, a specific psychological issue is discussed, applicable Greek and biblical narratives are compared, and contemporary illustrations are provided, enabling the reader to live in a more fulfilling and happy manner.

1

Relating to the Environment

Psycho-biblical Issue One:

What should my relationship to the environment be? Can I change any part of the environment or must I leave it exactly the way it is?

• • •

The Greek and biblical creation stories embody two radically different worldviews. Nature precedes the gods in the Greek version, but God precedes nature in the account. The differences in the respective orderings are not just chronological, but logical and psychological as well.1

The Greek Narrative

According to Hesiod, in the beginning there was Chaos, which has often been interpreted as a moving formless mass, from which the cosmos and the gods originated.2 The noun “xaos” refers to infinite space or time or the nether abyss while the verb “xao” denotes “to destroy utterly.”3 Chaos has come to mean complete disorder and confusion, a far cry from the formlessness implied by tohu vovohu in the biblical story of creation. There is the implication chaos must be subdued and controlled for the world to be formed.

In the Olympian theogony, nature exists before the gods. The male Sky (Ouranos) impregnates the female Earth (Gaia) and produces first the hundred-handed monsters and then the Cyclopes. The family pathology then immediately commences, as the father takes the children away from the mother. “Sky tied them (the Cyclopes) up and threw them into Tartarus, a dark and gloomy place in Hades as far from earth as earth is from the sky, and again had children by Earth, the so-called Titans.” Such action of course breeds reaction, and Earth repays Sky in spades.

Grieved at the loss of the children who were thrown into Tartarus, Earth persuaded the Titans to attack their father and gave Cronus a steel sickle . . . Cronus cut off his father’s genitals and threw them into the sea . . . Having thus eliminated their Father the Titans brought back their brother who had been hurled to Tartarus and gave the rule to Cronus.4

Thus, the Oedipal conflict is born, and indeed, ingrained through the Furies into the fabric of the natural world. Indeed, it seems to be an unchanging law of nature, foretold by Earth and Sky. When Earth and Sky foretold that Cronus would lose the rule to his own son, he devoured his offspring as they were born. The infant Zeus is saved through a ruse. When Zeus reaches adulthood he makes war on Cronus and the Titans, and defeats Cronus, fulfilling the prophecy of Earth and Sky. The drama of infanticide continues. Zeus himself is informed that his own son would displace him. To forestall this, he devoured his wife with the embryo in her womb. Nevertheless, Zeus is not all powerful, subject himself to the natural force of Necessity, which itself is controlled by the Fates and the Furies.5

Prometheus (“forethought” in Greek) and Epimetheus (“afterthought”), cousins of Zeus, who joined him in his war against his father Cronus, are assigned the responsibility of creating man. Prometheus shapes man out of mud and Athena, daughter of Zeus, breathes life into them. Prometheus assigned Epimetheus the task of giving the creatures of the Earth their various qualities, such as swiftness, cunning, strength, fur, wings. Unfortunately, by the time he got to man, Epimetheus had given out all the good qualities and there were none left for man. So Prometheus decided to “make man stand erect, bidding him look up to the heaven, and lift his head to the stars.”6

Yet Zeus has become enraged that Prometheus outwitted him into taking the white bones of a great ox concealed in folds of white fat, while first hiding and then giving to men the meaty parts, thick with fat. Zeus in retaliation decides to keep man subservient and thus withholds the knowledge of fire. But Prometheus steals fire, and hiding it in a hollow fennel stalk, gives it to man, enabling him to gain autonomy and have some constructive mastery with regard to his environment. Zeus, however, becomes furious over Prometheus’s theft of fire. In order to punish man, Zeus commissions his son Hephaestus to create a trap for man—woman, Pandora, a mortal of stunning beauty endowed with many gifts, a deceptive heart, and a lying tongue, who is described as a “race apart.” She opens an urn that Zeus has sent with her, which unleashes all the ills and evils unto the world, leaving hope alone locked in the now closed urn.7 All because Prometheus has dared to steal the secret of fire that Zeus has tried to withhold from man.

It is almost impossible to overestimate the importance of fire to human beings. Primitive human beings were dominated by nature. Day and night are different worlds. The sunlight of day provides human beings with light and heat. It enables them to distinguish land from water, friendly animals and people from predatory and dangerous ones, and provides relief from the cold. At night, the sun hides, and man is rendered helpless. But fire changes all this. It generates light and heat to hold the environment at bay. Fire enables man to separate the light from the dark and civilization from wilderness. It also enables him to forge and sharpen weapons and cooking utensils, make wheels and medicinal treatments, and cook and sanitize food. It enables the human being to constructively make his environment more inhabitable.

How do these stories impact on the Greek and later Roman relationships with the earth? There is no simple answer to this question. When we examine the evidence, we see a peculiar ambivalence. On the one hand, Earth, Gaia, was seen as the mother of gods, humans, and every living thing.8 As such, she was to be worshiped and not altered in any way that would upset an abstract balance. On the other hand, many of her offspring were monsters, and her fecundity had a dark side.

As evidence for the idealizing pole, the environmental historian J. Donald Hughes argues that “the Greeks in particular thought that rearranging land and sea was a prideful challenge to Zeus, who had ratified their limits when he divided the world with his brothers.”9 Hughes offers the following example to support this thesis. When the people of Cnidus tried to dig a canal through the neck of land that connected them to Asia Minor, many injuries occurred to the workmen from flying rock...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Relating to the Environment
• Chapter 2: Relating to Another as Yourself
• Chapter 3: Relating to an Authority
• Chapter 4: Relating to the Opposite Sex
• Chapter 5: Relating to a Son
• Chapter 6: Relating to a Daughter
• Chapter 7: Relating to Siblings
• Chapter 8: Relating Body to Soul
• Chapter 9: Relating to a Self-Destructive Person
• Chapter 10: Relating to Misfortune
• Conclusion
• Bibliography