Creation and Fall/The Human Being of Earth and Spirit

From YoKim

Gen. 2:7. The Human Being of Earth and Spirit 75

When Yahweh God made heaven and earth - there was no kind of shrub in the field yet, however, and no kind of herb of the field had yet sprouted; for Yahweh God had not yet caused it to rain on the earth, and there were no human beings yet to till the ground; but a spring of water went up from the earth and watered the whole land (v. 4bff.)^[1]

How CAN ONE SPEAK of the first earth, earth in its youth, except in the language of fantasy [Marchen]? God prepares an exceedingly magnificent garden for the human being [der Mensch]^[2] created with God's own hands.Pl What else would a person from the desert think of here but a land with magnificent rivers and trees full offruit? Precious stones, rare odors, gorgeous colors surround the first human being. The fruitful land in the distant east, between the Euphrates and the Tigris, of which so many wonderful things were being told - perhaps that was the place, the garden of the first human being.^[3] Who can speak of these things except in pictures? Pictures after all are not lies; rather they indicate things and enable the underlying meaning to shine through^[4] To be sure, pictures do vary; the pictures of a child differ from those of an adult, and those of a person from the desert differ from those of a person from the city. One way or another, however, they remain true, to the extent that human speech and even speech about abstract ideas can remain true at all - that is, to the extent that God dwells in them.

In complete consistency with the framework of the picture, the story is told how the human being was put into this garden to live in it, and how in the center [Mitte]^[5] of the garden stood two trees: one the tree of life and the other the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The destiny of humankind is now to be decided in relation to these two trees.l6]

Then Yahweh God fashioned humankind out of dust from the ground, and blew into its nose the breath of life; so the human being became a living being.

HERE WE ARE DIRECTED to the earth in a distinct and exclusive way that is quite different from before. What is of primary interest here is not at all the cosmos but our earth and humankind. Here God also receives a very specific proper name, Yahweh (on the meaning of which there is no agreement). This is God's real name; that is, it is the name of this God, the God who is being spoken of here. Elohim in Genesis 1 is not a proper name but a generic term and so means roughly 'deity' .^[6] One could suppose that such a proper name is evidence of a very primitive idea of God and shows that we have no right at all to be speaking here of the same God whose power chap. 1 has set forth. And yet just at this point one must reply that anthropomorphism in thinking of God, or blatant mythology, is no more irrelevant or unsuitable as an expression for God's being than is the abstract use of the generic term 'deity'. On the contrary, clear anthropomorphism much more plainly expresses the fact that we cannot think of 'God as such' whether in one way or another. The abstract concept of God, precisely because it seeks not to be anthropomorphic, is in actual fact much more so than is childlike anthropomorphisrn. If And we need a proper name for God so that we can think 7 of God in the right way. Indeed the proper name is God as such [an sich]. We have God in no other way than in God's name. This is true today as well. Jesus Christ - that is the name of God, at once utterly anthropomorphic and utterly to the point. If God fashioned humankind out of dust from the ground and blew into its nostrils the breath of life. Here again everything takes place in a very down-to-earth way. The way of speaking is extremely childlike and, for the person who wishes truly to comprehend or to 'know'Pl something, very offensive. How can one talk of God in the same way as one talks about a person who fashions a vessel out of earth and day?^[7] The anthropomorphisms become more and more insupportable: God models or molds with clay, and the human being is fashioned like a vessel out of an earthen clod. Surely no one can gain any knowledge about the origin of humankind from this! To be sure, as an account of what happened this story is at first sight of just as little consequence, andjust as full ofmeaning, as many another myth of creation. And yet in being distinguished as the word of God it is quite simply the source of knowledge about the origin of humankind. And now it will also become evident that this account belongs closely with the previous account and forms a unity with it. To say that Yahweh fashions humankind with Yahweh's own hands expresses two complementary things. On the one hand, it expresses the physical nearness of the Creator to the creature - expresses that it is really the Creator who makes me, the human being, with the Creator's own hands; it expresses the trouble the Creator takes, the Creator's thinking about me, the Creator's intention with me and nearness to me. On the other hand, it expresses also the omnipotence, the utter supremacy, with which the Creator fashions and creates me and in terms of which I am the Creator's creature; it expresses the fatherliness with which the Creator creates me and in the context of which I worship the Creator. That is the true God to whom the whole Bible bears witness.

The human being whom God has created in God's image - that is, in freedom - is the human being who is taken from earth. Even Darwin and Feuerbach could not use stronger language than is used here.^[8] Humankind is derived from a piece of earth. Its bond with the earth belongs to its essential being. The 'earth is its mother^[9] it comes out of her womb. To be sure, the ground from which humankind is taken is not the cursed but the blessed ground. It is God's earth out of which humankind is taken. From it human beings have their bodies. The body belongs to a person's essence.^[10] The body is not the prison, the shell, the exterior, of a human being; instead a human being is a human body. A human being does not 'have' a body or 'have' a soul; instead a human being 'is' body and soul.^[11] The human being in the beginning really is the body, is one -just as Christ is wholly his body and the church is the body of Christ. People who reject their bodies reject their existence 7: before God the Creator. What is to be taken seriously about human existence is its bond with mother earth, its being as body,^[12] 11Human beings have their existence as existence on earth. They do not come from above; they have not by some cruel fate been driven into the earthly world and been enslaved in it.^[13] Instead, the word of God the almighty one summoned humankind out of the earth in which it was sleeping, in which it was dead and indeed a mere piece of earth, but a piece of earth called by God to have human existence. "Wake up, you who are sleeping, rise up from the dead, and Christ will give you light"^[14] (Eph. 5:14))^[15]

This is also what Michelangelo thought.^[16] The Adam who rests on the newly created earth is so closely and intimately bound up with the ground on which Adam lies that Adam is, even in this still-dreaming state, a most singular and wonderful piece of earth - but even so still a piece of earth. Indeed it is precisely in this state of nestling [Hingeschmiegtsein]^[17] so closely to the blessed ground of the created earth that the whole glory of the first human being becomes visible. And in this resting on the earth, in this deep sleep of creation, the human being now experiences life through being physically touched by the finger of God. It is the same hand that has made the human being that now, as though reaching from afar, tenderly touches and awakens the human being to life. God's hand no longer holds the human being in its grasp; instead it has set the human being free, and the creative power of that hand turns into the yearning love of the Creator toward the creature. The hand of God in this picture in the Sistine Chapel discloses a greater knowledge about the creation than does much profound speculation.

And God blew into the human being's nostrils the breath of life; so the human person became a living being. Here body and life merge completely. God breathes the spirit of God into the body of the human being. And this spirit is life; it bringsthe human being to life. Other life is created through God's word, but in the case of human life God gives of God's own life, of God's own spirit. Human beings do not live as human beings apart from God's spirit. To live as a human being means to live as a body in the spirit. Flight from the body is as much flight from being human as is flight from the spirit. The body is the form in which the spirit exists, as the spirit is the form in which the body exists. All this is said only about humankind, for only in the case of human beings do we know about body and spirit.^[18] The human body differs from all non-human bodies^[19] in that it is the form in which the spirit of God exists on earth, just as it is altogether identical with all other life in being earthlike. The human body really does live only by God's spirit; that is what constitutes its essential being.^[20] God as such is glorified [Gott verherrlicht sich] in the body, that is, in the body that has the specific being of a human body. That is why where the original body in its created being has been destroyed, God enters it anew in Jesus Christ, and then, where this body too is broken, enters the forms of the sacrament of the body and blood. The body and blood of the Lord's Supper are the new realities of creation promised to fallen Adam. Because Adam is created as body, Adam is also redeemed as body [and God comes to Adam as body],^[21] in Jesus Christ and in the sacrament. Humankind created in this way is humankind as the image of God. It is the image of God not in spite of but precisely in its bodily nature. For in their bodily nature human beings are related to the earth and to other bodies; they are there for others and are dependent upon others. In their bodily existence human beings find their brothers and sisters and find the earth. As such creatures human beings of earth and spirit are 'like' God, their Creator.^[22]

[edit] Notes

1. ↑ Cf. LB, which says "And God the LORD made humankind out of a clo~ of earth, and breathed the living breath into its nose. And thus the hu~an ~emg became a living soul." The text follows Kautzsch, 12. EK calls the section The Human Being of Dust and Spirit" (8).
2. ↑ Kautzsch commented that "God (Heb. 'elohim) everywhere from here [2:4b] to 3:24 was apparently inserted by an editor who wished thereby to stre.ss that the Yahweh in 2:4ff. was no other than the 'elohim who created the world in ch. 1" (12, note a). Hans Schmidt disagreed with this (5, note 2). Schmidt's interest was in the separation of the sources within the section of Genesis from 2:4 to 3:24. His thesis was that the god in the story ofthe tree of knowledge (and then in that of the tree of life) is a different god than the one in Genesis 1 - namely the Canaanite god offertility. See Hans Schmidt, 29.
3. ↑ EK reads, "the abstract generic concept can by contrast wrongly be supposed to speak in a fully appropriate and legitimate way of God"
4. ↑ (8). Cf. Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, "the human form of God becoming a human being must appear as an essential element of religion in the definition of its object. ... So-called anthropomorphism [therefore seems to be legitimate]; only the empty specter of absolute abstract essence is what one needs to abjure" (Lasson ed., 12:161, with the words Lasson has added to fill out the text in square brackets). [trans. DSB] In Bonhoeffer's copy of the Lasson edition this has been marked heavily in pencil and with several exclamation marks in the margin.
5. ↑ Hegel emphasized against Kant that we can "know" of God, e.g., the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Lasson, 4). See Internationales Bonhoeffer Forum, 8:28. Cf. above, page 30.
6. ↑ Kautzsch commented that "God (Heb. 'elohim) everywhere from here [2:4b] to 3:24 was apparently inserted by an editor who wished thereby to stre.ss that the Yahweh in 2:4ff. was no other than the 'elohim who created the world in ch. 1" (12, note a). Hans Schmidt disagreed with this (5, note 2). Schmidt's interest was in the separation of the sources within the section of Genesis from 2:4 to 3:24. His thesis was that the god in the story ofthe tree of knowledge (and then in that of the tree of life) is a different god than the one in Genesis 1 - namely the Canaanite god offertility. See Hans Schmidt, 29.
7. ↑ Cf. Hans Schmidt, who says that in creating humankind "God works like a potter" (7).
8. ↑ EK reads, "To say that humankind is made of earth is to lay stronger emphasis on matter than DarwinjFeuerbach did" (9). Charles Darwin (18091882) derived the origin of the species - including the human species - from the process of natural selection in the struggle for existence (The Dr:igin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, first published in 1859). For LU?WIg ~euerbach (1804-1872) the human being as a sentient being was the startmg POl~t for.all thought. Cf. Bonhoeffer's characterization i~ 1~,31-32 of the ~ay. m which Friedrich Nietzsche takes up Feuerbach's doctnne: The human bemg IS no tr.an-scendent imaginary being but the ens realissimum," that is, the most real being (DBW 11:148 [GS 5:187]). [trans. DSB]
9. ↑ Cf. Sirach 40: 1 b, which speaks of the earth, "which is the mother of us all" [trans. DSB]; in Bonhoeffer's copy of LB the verse is marked with a heavy line in indelible pencil on the inside margin. In the lecture "Thy Kingdom Come" (Nov. 19, 1932), Bonhoeffer quotes the saying exactly (Preface to Bonhoeffer, 33 [GS 3:274]). Hans Schmidt refers to this biblical passage as well, see 34, note 1, and 38, note 1.
10. ↑ Cf. Emil Brunner, God and Man, 154: "Man is created as a bodily being, and his bodily nature is a part of his being." Bonhoeffer's copy of Brunner's book bears numerous markings on pages 70-100 (136-78 in the English translation). Bonhoeffer commended this study as reading matter for his seminar "Dogmatic Exercises [Theological Psychology]," which he ran in 1932-33 at the same time as his lecture course on "Creation and Sin" (see GS 5:342).
11. ↑ See Wilhelm Vischer, "Der Gott Abrahams," who claims that to the Hebrews "the human being does not have a soul, but on the contrary is a soul" (285). Cf. the reference in Ernst Georg Wendel, Homiletik, 91.
12. ↑ EK reads, "For the Bible what is to be taken seriously about human beings is their being as body, whereas for the Greeks it is their being as spirit, idea" (9). Friedrich Nietzsche pleads for the I to be honest with regard to the body in Zarathustra, in the section "On the Afterworldly," e.g., in the lines: "it was the body that despaired of the earth. . . . It wanted to crash through these ultimate walls - with its head, and not only with its head - over there to 'that world'" (The Portable Nietzsche, 143-44).
13. ↑ Bonhoeffer is here rejecting gnostic ideas; cf., e.g., Reinhold Seeberg, History of Doctrine 1:94. On the subject see Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: "a pre-cosmic fall of part of the divine principle underlies the genesis' of the world and of human existence in the majority of gnostic systems" (62). Cf. also Jonas's paragraphs on the term "cast" or "thrown" (63-65).
14. ↑ Cf. the NRSV translation: "Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you."
15. ↑ The 1933 edition incorrectly lists this passage as Eph. 5:4. UK (19) and EK (9) wrote down the correct reference, Eph. 5: 14, in their notes. In LB, "and rise up," the "and" corresponds to the Greek text. Bonhoeffer used this text in Ephesians as a basis for his baptismal address in October 1932 (DBW 11:463-66 [GS 4:150-52]). In his copy of LB this passage is marked in indelible pencil as a preaching text. Cf. also AB (DBWE 2):148-49, note 15.
16. ↑ Karl Barth refers to Michelangelo's painting of the creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican in The Epistle to the Romans, 249.
17. ↑ HP copied down the sentence fairly fully using this word (29). UK recorded a slightly different word in German (angeschmiegt for hingeschmiegt) that has no significant difference in meaning (19). The 1933 edition incorrectly reads Hingegebensein, "state of surrendering to." Karl Barth in his Church Dogmatics quotes the incorrect wording of 1933 and criticizes it (3/1:245).
18. ↑ UK reads here: "The bodily is the end of God's ways.' So an older theologian once said" (16). This is a saying of Friedrich Christoph Oetinger's (see below, page 121). Its mention at this point is also noted by FL (35) and HP (30).
19. ↑ EK says, "The human body differs from the vegetative body .... " (9).
20. ↑ In German nouns such as Geist, whether meaning "Spirit" or "spirit," are spelled with an initial capital letter. In these paragraphs Bonhoeffer seems to slide from the idea of God's spirit to that of the human spirit and back. [DSB]
21. ↑ The notes taken by UK (20) and EK (9) make it likely that the clause standing in the brackets was inadvertently omitted in the 1933 edition.
22. ↑ HP (30) and FL (36) here refer back to the "analogia relationis" (d. above, page 65). [Because Bonhoeffer so consistently speaks of Adam as Mensch, "human being," rather than as Mann, "man," here and in the section that follows (up to the point of the creation of woman), pronouns referring to Adam have been translated as referring to human beings in general, not just male human beings. Thus when "he" or "him" refers to "Adam," it has been translated variouslyas "Adam" or "the human being," or "humankind."] [DSB]