By Prof. James Taylor Christie, Professor Emeritus of Theology at the University of Winnipeg and a longtime ally and Viewpoints contributor of the G20 Interfaith Forum
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In the second of a three-part series, Christie traces the thread of universalism running through the Hebrew Scriptures, from the creation narratives to the prophets, and argues that the conviction driving today’s interfaith cooperation is written into the oldest layers of the tradition. Part I introduced the idea of “cosmopiety”; Part III will turn to the New Testament.
The Gifts of the Hebrew Scriptures
A generation ago, Thomas Cahill, onetime literary editor of the New York Times, unveiled a highly persuasive series of books known as the Hinge of History. Each volume was intended to illuminate an era, movement, or culture that radically changed the flow of human history, from early Christian Ireland to medieval mysticism.
The second volume was titled The Gifts of the Jews. The first gift, to be sure, was ethical monotheism. The second, in enormity like unto the first, was the concept of linear rather than cyclical time. It is always worth noting that this latter gift conforms to our current understandings of astrophysics and cosmology. I would go further, and suggest that the whole scientific worldview rests upon the foundations of the Tanakh. But that argument is for another time, another essay.
For the moment, suffice it to say that from the opening verses of the dual creation narratives in the book of Genesis, three principles are articulated with blinding clarity:
- There is one God, and that God creates with intent, and with unfathomable generosity and fecundity, into an unmeasurable and unimaginable future. And, on this planet at least, the evolutionary energies of God have resulted in the curious species of which you, gentle readers, are members. Not only that, but our sometimes noble and often sorry tribe is one, and one created in the image of God at that.
- It was, from the beginning, God’s intent that humanity be the caretaker of the creation.
- That single tribe of humanity is to steward creation as a universal project. “The earth is the Lord’s,” intones the Psalmist, “and the fullness thereof.” The Greek term for the household of God is oikoumene. All humanity is enjoined, therefore, to practice good housekeeping.
Both the Tanakh (the Hebrew scriptures) and the Christian Midrash (the commentary that Christians call the New Testament) are filled with seemingly endless particularities and peculiarities. And yet there runs through them a thread of universalism that binds the whole together. A brief inventory of the narratives intersecting that connective thread is instructive. (All references are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.)
Noah: A Covenant with Every Living Thing
Genesis chapters 6 through 9 recount the Great Flood. Even in the secular and plural context of twenty-first-century Western society, the basic storyline borders on the archetypal. The corrupt world so offends God that nothing save a great annihilating flood could cleanse the morass; yet a remnant of the righteous is to be preserved. So Noah builds a very big boat, and takes aboard his extended family and all the animals of the world in mating pairs, save, naturally, the sea creatures. It is an extravagant tale by any standard. But its essential point arrives in Genesis 9:16, where God establishes a covenant with “every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” This Noahide, universal covenant precedes the covenant God makes shortly thereafter with Abraham; and nowhere in the whole canon of Scripture is it ever suggested that God has revoked it.
Job: The Tale of Everyman
The Book of Job, in its entirety, is the Tanakh’s tale of Everyman. Again the basic storyline is archetypal. “There was once a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job” (Job 1:1). We are given to understand that he is under the Covenant; but Job could be anyone.
It is Job’s misfortune to become a topic of conversation between God and the Satan, who in this text plays the role of God’s prosecuting attorney. As the conversation proceeds, more in the manner of an Olympian court than the usual tone of Hashem’s dealings, God pronounces his servant Job to be as good, faithful, and upright as he appears. Satan replies, in a very loose translation, “Oh yeah? Let me at ’im. I’ll show you what he’s really made of. He’ll cave completely after I’m finished with him.”
The deal is struck, and Satan strikes. Poor innocent Job loses everything and everyone, save his wife, who in a less-than-supportive moment suggests he curse God and die. His friends, so-called, press him to search his soul: surely he must have done something to deserve so calamitous a fate, for a good God would not permit innocent suffering of this kind. But Job holds firm. He has kept the faith and stayed true to God.
Job wants answers, and he storms the gates of Heaven to get them. And lo, God does answer: noisily, dramatically, one might even suggest defensively. And Job, and we his audience, learn the meaning of ineffable.
It is not, perhaps, an entirely satisfying response. In the end Job is restored to prosperity, a new crop of offspring is provided, and to some, his unwavering faith has ensured that all’s well that ends well.
Except, of course, that all is not well in this renewed life of Job’s. He, and we, are left with the eternal conundrum of innocent suffering, and left forever to wrestle with that most vexing of puzzles. And so are the billions of our sisters and brothers, throughout time and space, who face the fact of suffering in their own lives. Job is a core narrative of the Tanakh; but it is not a Jewish story, save in the style of its telling. This ancient, complex tale is universal, as is the theology it embodies.
Isaiah, the Psalms, and Micah
The beloved, beautiful, and visionary words of Isaiah 2:1-4 are explicitly and generously universalist:
In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths’… they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
It is noteworthy that in this joyously apocalyptic vision the nations are called to come as they are, and to ascend the mountain of the Lord alongside Israel. They are not required to become Israel, but to come to God and to be instructed in God’s ways and will. Come as you are: it would be hard to find a more concise charter for interfaith encounter.
The Book of Psalms is diverse beyond simple description. Lament, praise, thanksgiving, anger, petition; in fact every element of human experience is evoked. As the foundational hymnbook of both Judaism and Christianity, the psalms are supremely important, and through their many melodies there runs an unmistakable universal strain. Psalm 67 is representative:
Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth… The earth has yielded its increase; God, our God, has blessed us; let all the ends of the earth revere him.
The same wide horizon opens in Psalm 8’s wonder at humanity’s place in creation, in Psalm 47’s acclamation of God as king over all the earth, and in Psalm 100’s summons to “all the earth” to make a joyful noise. The hymnbook of Israel is, again and again, a hymnbook for the whole world.
The prophet Micah, like so many of the Hebrew prophets, brings word that God has a bone to pick with his people Israel. And it is worth noting that even God’s annoyance is consistent with a universalist perspective: the vast majority of Israel’s shortcomings in the eyes of God are broadly human, rather than specifically Jewish. Micah declares the remedy in chapter 6, verse 8:
He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
Justice, kindness, humility: here is a moral vocation addressed not to one people but to every mortal. It is, in the end, the same vocation the G20 Interfaith Forum takes up whenever it gathers the world’s traditions to a common table. In the final essay, we follow the thread into the New Testament.
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James Taylor Christie is Professor Emeritus of Theology at the University of Winnipeg, where he served for some fifteen years as Dean of the Faculty of Theology, founding Dean of the Global College, and Director of the Ridd Institute for Religion and Global Policy. An ordained minister of The United Church of Canada and a past president of the Canadian Council of Churches, he is a pioneer of dialogue theology and “whole world ecumenism,” and the inaugural Ambassador-at-Large for the Canadian Multifaith Federation. A longtime ally of the G20 Interfaith Forum and a frequent contributor to its Viewpoints blog, he writes at the intersection of faith, scripture, and global policy, in the conviction that the world’s religions are called to speak, and to work, with one another.