Creation and Fall/The Other Side

From YoKim

THE OTHER SIDE^[1]

IT WAS LONG AGO REALIZED that what we have here is a second creation 67 story that is quite different from, and substantially older than, the first.^[2] What are we to make of that?^[3] What does it mean for our exposition? When one first looks at both creation stories together, it is plain that the first and the second accounts are only representations [Darstellungen] of the same thing from two different sides; indeed it must even be said that the first without the second, like the second without the first, would not express what there was to say here. (To be sure, this judgment in turn arises only from listening to and understanding scripture as a whole.)

The first account is thought out wholly from above, from where God is. Humankind is here the final work of God's self-glorification. The world is created for God, for God's honor alone, and humankind is the most precious receptacle, the very mirror of the Creator. It is totally for the sake of God's glory and honor as Creator that everything comes to pass. In spite of the creation of humankind, the world remains the world in the deep,^[4] the strange, distant world. The second account by contrast is about the world in its nearness and about the Lord who is near on earth, living together with Adam in Paradise. The first account is about humankind-for-God, the second about God-for-humankind. The first is about the Creator and Lord, the second about the fatherly God who is near at hand.^[5] The first is about humankind as the final work of God, with the whole world created before humankind, the second just the other way around: in the beginning humanity is created, and around humankind, for the sake of humankind, God fashions animals and birds and lets the trees grow. The second account tells the story of humankind - the first is about what God does; but the second is about the history of humanity with God - the first is about the work of God with humanity; the second is about the God who is near at hand - the first is about the strange God; the second about God in human form, the God of childlike anthropomorphism - whereas the first is about the deity of God. Yet both are only human words, childlike but humble words, about the same God and the same humankind. Hence Genesis 2 [is ]^[6] the other side of Genesis^[7] - not an arbitrary but a necessary side, at any rate once the whole has been understood.

This corresponds roughly to the state of being "formless and empty" in the first account.N^[8]

[edit] Notes

1. ↑ In the notes of the students who attended the lectures this stands under the heading, "Second Main Part."
2. ↑ UK reads, "From the Yahwist's source" (16). During the lectures Bonhoeffer used the technical terms of textual criticism. Kautzsch refers to the source of the Yahwist' (called J, because from the beginning it uses the divine name, Yahweh fJahwe in German] [DSB])" (3). The first, but later, creation story comes from the source P, the "Priestly document." Kautzsch maintains thatJ was written between 900 and 750 B.C.E. and P between 600 and 450 B.C.E. (4, 7). The French medical doctor Jean Astruc first differentiated two interwoven narratives in Genesis in 1753 (see Kautzsch, 2). [Later in the eighteenth century J. G. Eichhorn discovered additional evidence for these narratives as source documents. The work of these and other scholars culminated in the second half of the nineteenth century in the well-known hypothesis ofK. H. GrafandJulius Wellhausen that the Pentateuch was compiled from four source documents of diverse age and origin.] UDEG]
3. ↑ HP reads, "The opposition of the sources P and J can be used to demonstrate their relativity" (27). EK records the same almost word for word (8).
4. ↑ Cf. Gen. 1:2. [DSB]
5. ↑ HP says, "The second account portrays the gentle fatherly God who is near at hand" (27). The expression milde, "gentle," also occurs in UK (17).
6. ↑ In Bonhoeffer's text there is a colon in place of the verb 'is,' which here has been supplied by the translator. [DSB]
7. ↑ As Kautzsch points out, in v. 4b the Hebrew text reads "earth and heaven, not as in 1:1 and 2:1, the heaven and the earth" (12, note b). Kautzsch renders v. 5 "caused it to rain upon the earth." Otherwise the text largely follows Kautzsch, 12. Instead of "Yahweh God," LB always reads Cott der HErr [printed in this way], "God the LORD." Cf. LB, which reads "and every kind of tree in the field was not yet on earth, and every kind of herb in the field had not yet grown, for God the LORD had not yet caused it to rain on earth, and there were no human beings who tilled the land. But a mist went up from the earth and made all the land damp." (Only) FL noted the reference to literature at this point: "Hans Schmidt history-of-religions problem popular lectures" (33). Schmidt's study, Die Erziihlung von Paradies und Sundenfall (The story of paradise and the fall), appeared in the series "Sammlung gemeinverstandlicher Vortrage und Schriften aus dem Gebiet der Theologie und Religionsgeschichte" (Collected popular addresses and essays in the area of theology and the history of religions). By the translation "the rainclouded heaven" Schmidt sought to show that "What is here in mind is the idea of a 'marriage' between heaven and mother earth" (37). Bonhoeffer rejects this thesis, which Schmidt extended to Gen. 1:2 (38); see above, page 38 and editorial note 41.
8. ↑ Schmidt draws attention to the fact that according to the second account humankind "is created on the wasteland of a still wholly barren earth" (7).