Power In His Presence

JOURNAL ARTICLE

 

TITLE OF THE ARTICLE: PREHISTORY IN THE CALL TO ABRAHAM

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: LYLE ESLINGER- (Not enough history about him)-Not available

He is part and parcel of the Department of Religious Studies, The University of Calgary Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA: SEMEIA- AN EXPERIMENTAL JOURNAL FOR BIBLICAL CRITICISM, VOLUME 6, 1976

URL: NONE

OUTLINE OF THE ARTICLE:

1. INTRODUCTION
2. ABRAHAM’S CALL AND GRACE
3. ABRAHAM’S ELECTION IN CONTEXT

- Rhetoric of the Call

- Body Language of the Response

4. NARRATIVE CONTEXT OF THE CALL

- Lives of the Patriarchs

- The Genesis Pre-History

5. ABRAHAM IN HYPERCHRONIC CONTEXT

WHAT THE ARTICLE IS ALL ABOUT:

1. INTRODUCTION

The biblical story of Abraham provides an insight into the birth of the gods from the womb of human optimism. Religious optimism is an unexpected answer to environment insufficiency. One way that imagination has met compulsion’s demands was to conceive a plethora of superhuman agents within and eventually behind natural manifestations of power. There is the recurrent mismatch between environmental obstacles and the ineluctable quest for a better life awakens awareness of the need of an agent to overcome the obstacles.

In the so-called Abrahamic traditions the matter of agency is consistently resolved in favor of divine rather than human agency.

 

2. ABRAHAM’S CALL AND GRACE

The Genesis Pre-history weighs the advantages and liabilities of achieving the goals of biologically based optimism by divine and human agents. The story and Abraham and Sara is not only integral to this narrative mythologizing, it is in the culmination. Abraham’s unmerited election has fed the development of exclusivism and xenophobia among the self-perceived elect, careful consideration of the pre-text to Abraham’s call reveals another aspect in which there are clear pragmatic reasons for God’s choice of Abraham.

 

 

 

3. ABRAHAM’S ELECTION IN CONTEXT

The archetype and folk-historical value of Abraham’s call derives from a restriction to issues of interest in devotional and theological contexts. The promise to Abram points in the direction of Abram becoming a great people the promise can apply to the people of Israel only at the height of its prosperity. Contextual awareness is essential to an appreciation of ancient mythology embedded in literature but historical-critical reading duplicates the traditional predilection to turn too quickly to its own concerns, away from the embedded evidence of literal detail, narrative structure, overarching mythological concern.

- Rhetoric of the Call

Abraham’s Rhetoric call by God is “get yourself from your land, from your kin, from your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). In the ancient social order, as for most humans who have ever lived, family and territory were an individual’s primary hold on life-sustaining resources and bulwark against adversarial encroachments. This is what God asks Abraham to renounce, no less. The power of a god far surpasses the collective might of other humans. But why does God require Abraham’s isolation from other humans?

- Body Language of the Response

Abraham’s response is a model of faith traditionally. The precise phonetic correspondence between the divine command, “go get yourself” and Abram’s response “so he went” is venerated as a most exacting obedience. God’s fancy of an isolated devotee going along with his god are matched by Abram’s and his tribe’s collective presence. Abram’s social bridges are portable, not burnt, setting a course within which faith’s mainstream has since flowed. What drives both the call and the response is singular and human: the need for security.

 

4. NARRATIVE CONTEXT OF THE CALL

- Lives of the Patriarchs

The story of the issues of the call continues to the shape and pattern of Abraham’s life as a whole. Demands for self resignation are matched by further offers of reward and Abraham’s story is famous for repeated promises of the good that will come from submission to God. The story of Abram and Sarai turns on the matter of security. Promises of the land, wealth and progeny are subsets of this primary concern

- The Genesis Pre-History

God’s motive for calling Abram is perplexing. As God he has the need to ask anything of anyone, hence the traditional belief that the call is unconditioned. The immediate narrative context supplies no obvious information and so has not been scrutinized. But in the light of the parallel between God’s response to the generation before the flood and to the tower builders, one thing stands out about Abraham’s call. In events leading to the tower confrontation humans had rebuilt their population base, the foundation of collective human agency. The tower project demonstrates their potential. The mythology of agency provides the logic of confrontation, explaining why God targets their collective cognitive capacity, not the tower as one might expect.

 

- Abram in Hyperchronic Context

The anxieties about the mythology of agency are cross-cultural, suggesting an archaic origin (the common antecedent to cultural diversity, expressed in cultural universals) and the need to attend to an archaic chronological frame in order to understand them. Classical literatures like the Bible are rich accumulations of culture’s archaic depths, offering comparatively innocent reflections of this pre-historic past. Like depth psychology, hyperchrony considers classical cultures of the agricultural age in the light of the archaic past, while eschewing the tangle of primal events, psychic layers and archetypal structures that fossilized into depth psychology’s meta-myths.